PM from bootable CD doesn't see USB drive

I have a USB HD adapter that I want to use to copy a hard drive to a new drive in my PC using PM Personal Edition 11, and for safety reasons wanted to do it from a standalone boot. The HD and all its partitions are recognized fine when I connect it on the XP system.

The problem is that the Linux boot CD created on the PC by PM does not see the USB adapter. The internal HD is recognized, but not the external one. I had to boot in "Safe Mode" in order for the boot to succeed -- is that part of the problem? Are there some BIOS settings that I have to look for?

Any help would be appreciated as I wanted to get this done today; otherwise I'll have to put everything back together the way it was and lose a day of work.

More details: In Normal mode, things go along OK with the console output for a while, but somewhere along the way I see a "Failed" status scroll by. After "Waiting for Init" it goes into an error message loop saying it can't find /tmp/wizard.txt and "The program can not start due to incorrect BIOS settings".

Doug G

 

Safe Mode doesnt' have USB drivers at all. It is DOS-based.

Could you please reproduce the error in Normal mode and describe it in details?

 

This is extremely discouraging, as I just tried it again on a completely different PC that I have with the same results. The first was an HP a810e and the second a HP 775y. There is very little in common between these PCs.

In Normal mode, in either case, after it gets to the "Wait for Init" stage and pauses for a few seconds, it goes into an error-message loop. It's hard to read since it's scrolling by very fast, but it tells me (as does the Paragon knowledge base) there there is probably a problem with BIOS settings related to the video card, and the frame size might need to be increased. It also can't find a file /tmp/wizards.txt.

Another item of note is that, in the messages that scroll by before it gets to the "Wait for Init" stage, most lines end in a green "done", but I can see one fly by that says "Failed" in red. But no hope of reading it before it's gone.

The instructions for "fixing" this condition are not possible for me to follow since my BIOS has no settings for video frame size, etc. I find it hard to believe that the Linux drivers can't handle the condition. The first PC has an on-board Intel video controller, but the 2nd one has an nVidia AGP card. Seems like a very common configuration to me!

 

I'm afraid the Linux cd does have some limitataions.

Sounds like you need the WinPe or Bartpe versions.