Just booting tips

Yeah, thanks, I understand these details. I don't understand why the USB is no longer recognized as a bootable device. If Grub is in the MBR, I should get a Grub prompt even if menu.lst is wrong, missing, whatever. I've tried ten ways tonight that don't work, including permutations of grub, syslinux, fdisk, dd and MBRWiz. Nada. I even managed to hose the other USB that was still working, and now it doesn't boot.

Update
Maybe this is a BIOS problem with my PC. Today I downloaded Ubuntu and used the pendrivelinux Universal USB Installer to reinitialize the failed USB stick.

Still isn't recognized by my PC, but a friend's HP laptop booted it just fine. At least all of the recent searching wasn't a total waste: I'm writing this from Ubuntu booted on my Macbook. The same stick now boots on both a PC and on my MacBook, using grub-efi that doesn't need to be added to the MBR. Very cool.

It won't boot on my friend's MacBook Pro (kernel loads, but it hangs after the initrd). In fact, the second and third times I tried, the USB stick was no longer recognized as a boot device on the MacBook Pro. When I booted OS X and looked, disk manager showed that the boot flag had been reset. However, when I got home just now, it booted up fine again on my MacBook.

Anyone know the trick to booting Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro?

Success, finally. In frustration, I dd'd a kilobyte from /dev/zero to the device and rebooted. Got the cryptic message "Boot error". So an error's better than nothing! That lead me to this article and then this page. The fix that worked for me:

Code:

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sudo mkdiskimage -F /dev/sdX 0 128 32    # good for my 2GB USB stick

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Immediately after this, gparted didn't like the partition. However, after running the Puppy Universal Installer, everything is copacetic once again: gparted is happy, and I can boot from the stick on my PC. Yay, hooray.
six
I hope this saves someone else the 100 or so hours I spent on this (well, seemed like it anyway...in six and a half days, maybe fifteen hours, but still, whadda drag).

After screwing around for a couple of days i tried your tip on line E3=other=/dev/hda8
label=Linux_in_hda8

added to lilo and bingo it worked , looks so easy after messing with grub (which i like by the way) but with so many different options my head was about to explode,thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge .

Gaetan

nuttron,

I think I might guilty of trying to popularize Grub at the expense of Lilo. It is great to hear someone can make good use of Lilo which has been faithfully retained by the Slackware and Slax families.

Ok, not sure if this is the right place to post this and ask these questions - but looking around the net, it appears to be the best I've found...so here goes.

1. Let us assume I have formatted a blank USB stick showing as H: - 1GB, 2, 4, 8 etc. with a fat32 file system, likely to be done in Windows since I haven't got a Linux system yet, and I use the command:

format H: /FS:FAT32

(I happen to have Windows 2000, service pack 4 - this command is ancient - haven't tried it with Vista or 7)

2. Now I have a Linux OS to install on there - for tiny problem and tiny copy, lets use Tiny Core - about 10MB.

Tiny Core likes to be installed in a folder, \TCE off the root. So, I get their files and place them there - primarily

H:\tce\bzImage
and
H:\tce\tinycore.gz

3. Now I've used syslinux, ntldr and grldr, linuxlive (?livelinux?), syslinux etc. - and GRUB

Not quite sure about how this works, but thus far, Grub working on a W2K box has been the most reliable and easy to configure. syslinux seems to "hang" and Lilo? Uh - problems...

So I have

grldr
and
menu.lst

... sitting in a folder on my C: W2K drive - just a "storage" folder -
and I copy them to the USB stick

copy c:\stuff\grldr H:\

copy c:\stuff\menu.lst

4. I use notepad to edit menu.lst and have a basic menu.lst file

timeout=
default=0
title Pocket Rocket Linux
find --set-root /tce/tinycore.gz
kernel /tce/bzImage quiet norestore bkg=splash.jpg desktop=jwm waitusb=15 xvesa=1400x1050x24
initrd /tce/tinycore.gz

...saved as H:\menu.lst

So at the end here I have - in the root

H:\grldr

and

H:\menu.lst

and below that

H:\tce\bzImage

and

H:\tce\tinycore.gz

5. QUESTION: why won't it boot?


It used to (sort of) when I had syslinux working - sometimes booted ok -sometimes hung - but BIOS was capable of seeing it and running. Since it hung half the time I figured I'd use GRUB (grldr and menu.lst) which has been very reliable on the W2K box, installed on C:\grldr and C:\menu.lst

I liked Grub so much I said "To heck with syslinux (hangs) or Lilo or anything else.

6. I have a feeling it has to do with the MBR - master boot record

I have seen answers that say "Go copy this or that file from another Linux CD to the USB drive.

QUESTION: I would like to know if there is anything I could type in NOTEPAD - or even use Perl or quick basic - and write a quickie bit of data - less than 512 bytes - that could tell BIOS to GO RUN GRLDR - which will automatically snag menu.lst and do whatever it wants to do - i.e. use the grub find command and away we go

Basically I want to open notepad or use some "editor" and create the commands (?assembler?) that say "Go run grldr (or something) so the grub parameters are executed.

Is there a method of either doing this manually or somehow getting grub / grldr to run?

Thank you in advance.

grandmalinux,

Welcome to Justlinux!


Since not all your items require an answer I suppose the following does:

Answer to Q5 - Grub always to to either /boot or /boot/grub subdirectory to look for its system files. Putting the system files in a place of your own choice will not work. Your menu.lst is flawed as it does not have a root statement telling which device it has to boot from.

Similarly for a Linux distro working as a Live CD its installer has been written to go back to a certain directory to fetch the files during the booting up stage. Therefore if you move Tiny Core Linux to a USB jump drive you should keep its original subdirectory system intact.

Answer to Q6 - Grub1 is quite simple and has two parts The stage1 is 512 byte long for installing into the MBR. The main intelligence is stage2. When you install Grub in the MBR it will "hard code" the hard disk address of its stage2.

In the simplest form Satge1 loads the stage2 and you get a Grub prompt. However if there is a menu.lst created, say using any editor like Notepad, gedit, nano, vi, Vim etc, Grub will execute it. Therefore you could do a bit of playing around in addition to booting systems.

Does the above answer your queries?