Booting from a USB key without BIOS support

I have an old laptop where the CD-ROM has died. However, the floppy still works. The BIOS is too old to boot from USB, so my thought was to create a boot floppy that boots from USB.

For this, I use Puppy LInux's wakepup. What WakePup appears to do is:

1. Boot and load all of the CD and USB drivers.
2. Mount any USB and CD detected.
3. Use Lnlin to load the Acronis kernel.

I tried this with Puppy and it works pretty good. The drivers mount the USB key as a drive, so I can do the following:

ldlin image=c:\vmlinuz initrd=c:\ramdisk "cl=/dev/ram0"

When I tried this with TrueImage 9, I notice that there is no vmlinuz and ramdisk. A check on the bootwiz.cfg indicate that dat4.dat is probably the kernel and dat3.dat is probably the ramdisk, so I do:

ldlin image=c:\dat4.dat initrd=c:\dat3.dat "cl=/dev/ram0 /s mbrcrcs=on"

Unfortunately, when I ran this, I get a kernel panic. Anyone have experience with trying to bootstrape from a flopppy to a usb key?

Note that the USB key works on a different machine on their own that supports USB boot.

Paul

 

Take a look at this thread, it might help.

 

Not really, I already know about the two files. I just can't load them under ldlin for some reason. Perhaps I'll try loadln to see if that behaves differently.

Paul

 

Got it working

OK, I got the Puppy WakePup to load the Acronis TrueImage on a USB key. Now, I can boot from a floppy, and have it load Acronis TrueImage from the USB Key. I have log what I did in this blog:

http://paulsiu.wordpress.com/2007/0...ven-when-your-bios-does-not-support-usb-boot/

The reason I had so much trouble before was because linld boot loader did not create a large enough ramdisk to load the kernel. Adding the ramdisk_size parameter fixed the problem.