[Gllug] Bootable pen drives again

[Christopher Currie]

There have been various threads about USB, U3, and Kingston Data Travelers in 
the last three weeks. I've now attempted to install, using four Data Traveler 
2GB sticks, the following Linux/Unix distros on them. Would be glad of 
comments from the experience of others.

(( I didn't know the following [quoted by Eric Veen referring here):
http://syslinux.zytor.com/faq.php#harddrive
"SysLinux will not work (and will refuse to install) on filesystems with a 
cluster size of more than 16K (typically means a filesystem of more than 1 
GB.)"']

In fact it did seem to work on the 2GB sticks and did not refuse, and that 
didn't seem to be the cause of the problems I had. Or was it?))

PC-BSD 1.3 (from CD installer)
Desktop-BSD 1.6RC1  (from CD installer)
Kubuntu 6.10 (from CD installer)
Freespire 1.1.57 (from CD installer)
MEPIS 6.0 (from CD installer and in live-CD format using mount-iso-and-copy, 
as here: http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/08/1522251&from=rss)
PC-Linux OS 0.93 (from CD installer and in live-CD format using 
mount-iso-and-copy)
Slax 5.0.6  (from CD installer and in live-CD format using mount-iso-and-copy)
PuppyLinux 2.12 and 2.13 (using both Puppy Universal Installer and QEMUPuppy).
Elive (couldn't find an installer!)

Basically, my conclusions are that (i) most standard  distros, even those 
distributed on single CDs and aimed at personal desktop users,  require more 
than 2GB for a minimal standard installation,  (ii) their approach to the 
LiveCD setup varies so much that you've probably got a lot of work to get a 
pseudo live CD to boot and run reliably from a pendrive, 

so (iii) despite the 10fold increase in pendrive capacity over the last couple 
of years there still isn't any practical alternative to DSL or Puppy for 
these drives. Maybe when 8GB becomes cheap that will change.

I already have my desktop's Grub set up with an option to boot from  a USB 
drive 2 running PC-BSD, in addition to the default SuSE 10.1, so it should 
have been a simple matter to replace the USB drive with a bootable pendrive 
and test it, without having to modify the BIOS hard-drive settings to treat 
the pen drive as the first hard drive/drive 0.

About 3 weeks ago I bought from Amazon (subconmtractor flash-memory.co.uk) a 
2GB *non-U3'd* Kingston DataTraveler and tried to install PC-BSD 1.3 on it. 
The installer did not recognize the drive at all (I later found out that this 
was because it can't handle more than four drives and I'd failed to 
disconnect two external USB drives before inserting the stick). 

I then tried to  install Kubuntu 6.10 on it. It recognized the stick 
as /dev/sdc.The installer partitioned the drive to set up a 110MB swap file,  
but after spending an hour or two copying files to the remaining sdc1 
partition it decided that it couldn't put the MBR on to sdc and gave up.

I then wiped the Kubuntu files & tried installing Puppy Linux 2.12 on the 
stick, using the Puppy Universal installer available from the Setup menu 
within Puppy, without changing Kubuntu's partitioning of the stick. This 
worked, and I've since updated to 2.13. 

The stick booted both from the GRUB setup mentioned above, and as drive 0 
following rearranging the BIOS hard-drive order. I was also able to get 
QEMUpuppy  (http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/qemupuppy/) onto it and, in emulator 
mode, it booted & ran correctly from within the booted Puppy. (It won't run 
from within SuSE without changes to the startup script).

While testing the Puppy stick I discovered of course that I needed to change 
the BIOS (i)  to make the USB detector recognize the stick as a hard drive & 
not rely on the auto setting and (ii) then to give it priority in the list of 
hard drives and boot search menus.

I thought this was the problem with my failures over PC-BSD and Kubuntu so 
ordered a couple more sticks from Amazon (supplied by a different 
subcontractor, easylaptopshop). They sent, and charged me for, 4, because of 
problems with Amazon's wonderful patented ordering system, but despite the 
wastage in packaging they were so cheap that  I decided not to return them 
but to keep them for more experiments.  I've now used three more and still 
have one spare.

I then tried to install PC-BSD on the stick, but it failed at 99 per cent, 
claiming bootloader problems. I retried with version 1.3.01, selecting 
'upgrade', but it ran out of space on the stick. Desktop BSD had the same 
problem but warned me first, so I cancelled the installation.

I tried another stick successively with Kubuntu, MEPIS and PCLinuxOS 9.3. All 
ran out of space or warned that they would

On a third stick i tried installing Slax 5.0.6 in live CD mode, using cp -ra 
and then syslinux -s /dev/sda1, as here: 
http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/08/1522251&from=rss

but  the PC hung, claiming that the stick had no OS.

I then decided to see if installing Puppy on the stick would make it bootable 
again, and then to replace the Puppy flies by the slax ones.  I had to erase 
the slax  partition and recreate a new Fat16 partition with gparted. This 
half-worked, though after the replacement with the Slax files I had to use 
syslinux -s again. But (both with Puppy and the recopied Slax) the stick only 
worked in the GRUB mode as drive 2; trying to use it as drive 0 continued to 
give 'no operating system' error.

I tried similarly installing Puppy on the two other sticks. One ended up with 
a stick that would boot as drive 0 but not through Grub (it gives 'boot 
error'), and the other (like the first Slax stick) the other way round.

the Puppy PUI allows you to recreate the MBR, either with Syslinux mbr.bin or 
with one of three other routines. No made any difference to curing the three 
defective sticks.

So in the end I have

(i) stick with Puppy that will boot as drive 0 *or* (from GRUB) as drive 2;
(ii) stick with Puppy that will boot only from GRUB as drive 2;
(iii) stick with Slax ditto;
(iv) stick with Slax that will boot only as drive 0 but *not* from Grub.

and (v) one I'm holding until I can do something more useful with it.

All this involved a lot of changes and rechanges to the BIOS, which seems not 
a good idea.

Any comments or suggestions on curing the faulty sticks?

Christopher Currie
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug