usb flash drive problem

Do you have Acronis Disk Director? If so can you post a screen shot of the USB flash drive as seen in Disk Director, manual mode?

 

Don't have that. ATI 11, Ghost 9, PM8, that's about it.

 

Then take a look at your flash drive with PM8. You will have to boot from the PM8 CD to be able to see it. See what the partition structure looks like and check to see if the boot flag on the partition is set.

Unfortunately, in the bootable version of PM8 the only way to get a screen shot will be with a digital camera.

 

That'll be tomorrow. Gotta go!

 

Got a 15 day trial version of Disk Director. I have attached the Properties of the flash drive. Is this what you need to see?

 

Oh, good idea.

How about the main window view of Disk Director, like the 3rd picture in this post.

 

Here we go. This time the flash drive is after following MudCrab's guide for creating a bootable flash drive. Sad to say, nothing has changed, Windows recognises the drive but won't boot from it.

I think we're stuffed, basically

 

Earthling,

When you restored my "empty" FAT32 image to your flashdrive, did you do it in Windows or from the TI CD (Full or Safe Mode)?

If the Safe Mode version wasn't tried and it can see your flashdrive, I would try it. Working with flashdrives in Windows can be quite problematic at times.

Other questions:

When you look at the USB flashdrive in the computer's BIOS boot list, does it show up with the flashdrive name or a generic USB-HDD type entry?

Does your BIOS show all USB boot devices with their names or does it show only generic USB-HDD, USB-CD, USB-ZIP entries?

If the computer is older, it may recognize the FAT16 image or one of the USB-ZIP formatted images. It doesn't hurt to try.

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In DD, you can right-click on Disk 4 (as shown in your image), select Advanced->Edit. This will bring up the Disk Editor. Select the View->As Hex option. Change the screen size to show then entire Absolute Sector 0 (all 512 bytes). A screenshot of that will help determine if the MBR got restored correctly.

 

Ah, we're thinking alike.

Earthling:

It would also be helpful to right-click on the "J" partition (as shown in your screen shot) and do the same as MudCrab is suggesting (Disk Editor > View as Hex). A look at both the MBR and the partition's boot sector may also help shed some light on the problem.

 

Easy you guys, you're talking to a Plug 'n Play guy here

I'll have a go though. Thnx

 

Booting from my VistaPE disk here is the hex dump of the first sector I can see - sector 63. It seems 0-62 are hidden?

 

Is this useful re the above?

 

The screenshot in Post #36 is correct for the Boot Sector.

To see the MBR, you need to right-click on the Disk 4 text in the DD display and select Advanced->Edit. It should show Absolute sector 0 instead of Absolute sector 63.

 

Earthling:

Apparently you used Acronis Bootable Media Builder to set up this flash drive. If you look at the last few lines of the hex dump in post #36 you can see the text "BOOTWIZ SYS", which is the file that is to be booted. Bootwiz.sys is used by the Acronis recovery applications.

Your picture in post #37 does answer another question I was going to ask about the cluster size. It is 4kB (512 bytes/sector x 8 sectors/cluster = 4KB), so that will work with Vista's boot manager.

So this flash drive will not boot unless you run the Acronis Bootable Media Builder app on it to include the Acronis recovery programs. If you want the flash drive to boot VistaPE then you will need to write a Vista boot sector to it by following steps 4 and 5 in this post.

To see sectors 0 - 62 you need to first click on the symbol for the disk drive before choosing "Edit". If you click instead on the symbol for a partition, you will only be able to see sectors that start at the beginning of that partition.

 

I must give it to you guys, models of patience.

I'll come back later with answers to Mudcrab's questions about the BIOS, but one more go at this before I get divorced. I've set the flash drive up again booting from my VistaPE disk and using Media Builder to copy MudCrab's blank partition, copied the files from my VistaPE disk to it, used a Vista DVD to run the elevated bootsec command, and rebooted to the flash drive.

It didn't work.

Here is the boot sector -

 

Both the flash drive and the external drive are named in the boot list.

 

This stuff, while sometimes fun, isn't worth that risk!

I'm not following what you did with Media Builder here. Making too many simultaneous changes can make troubleshooting difficult. For example, is the Partition Boot Record illustrated in post #36 still the same as before or did it change? The one illustrated in post #36 is incorrect if you want it to boot VistaPE. What do you have now after making these changes?

The Master Boot Record illustrated in post #40 does look to be correct. The code portion from bytes 000h through 17Bh is identical to the standard Windows XP MBR as illustrated here. The partition table in bytes 1BEh through 1FDh looks to have only one primary, active partition of type 0B (FAT32), so I don't see anything wrong there.

What do you see happening on-screen while trying to boot? Do you see any error messages? What are they? For example, if you see "Missing Operating System" then that message is from the MBR and probably means that you don't have any partition set as active. Having the exact text of the error message will help us pinpoint how far in the boot process your PC is able to proceed, and that may lead to identifying the source of the problem.

I know that both MudCrab and I would really like to understand why most PCs can successfully boot from USB flash drives but some will stubbornly refuse to.

 

It's OK, she's forgiven me

As attached

There are no messages of any sort. It is set to boot from flash, but just goes on to boot from hard disk.

 

I'm glad that she's the forgiving type

Your partition boot record looks good; it is set up to boot the file "bootmgr", which is the boot manager file used in Vista or VistaPE. So this should work. I've attached the partition boot record from my VistaPE USB flash drive for comparison.

That seems to leave only the computer's BIOS as a source of problems, unless I've missed something. Everything else looks as it should as far as I can tell. At this point there are few choices left. You can:

1. Check with your motherboard manufacturer to see if there are any BIOS updates available.
2. Check settings in the BIOS to see if there are any related to USB legacy mode. If so, try each one to see if anything changes.
3. Try booting your USB flash drive on other PCs. If it works OK on other machines then it rules out problems with the software on the flash drive.

 

Earthling,

The fact that the USB flashdrive and external show up with their names is good. That means the BIOS is actually reading the devices and not just trying to use some generic setting to boot them.

Does the BIOS have only one boot list or does it have a separate boot list for hard drives?

If it has a separate list, does the USB flashdrive show up in the hard drive list?

Does the BIOS let you select all the boot entries in the master boot list to be one device? For example, can you select them all to be the flashdrive? If so, set them all and then try and boot. If not, you could disconnect all other drives, set the flashdrive as the boot device and then try and boot from it. This way there are no other possible boot devices and you should get an error message if something isn't working.

Currently, it seems as if the computer is just skipping over the flashdrive without giving any error message.

 

Thanks for the responses. I have tried setting all the boot devices as the flash, and I have also tried disabling every device but the flash. What I then get is -

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I've also tried to boot the old PC with the flash, which produces -

Searching for boot record from USB RMD-FDD...OK

but it doesn't go any further until I unplug the flash.

Unfortunately my laptop BIOS doesn't have a boot from USB option so although you guys reckon my flash is now set up correctly, I'm still not able to prove it.

But it seems the Vista PC's BIOS is the problem. It has been flashed with the latest version so that's about all we can do. It's disappointing but I have learned a great deal from all of this.

Thank you both very much

 

Earthling:

Disappointing after all this effort. I can only think of two more things you could try. Some PCs that have trouble booting USB flash drives will sometimes work with one format but not the other. Since you've tried FAT32 then you could try FAT16.

The other is the USB hard disk mentioned in an earlier post. If that works it should load VistaPE faster than your CD-ROM.

 

I'm intending to try that. Don't know whether it was really necessary but I have already used PM8 to create 2GB of unallocated space at the start of the external drive. I'll try that, and if that doesn't work I'll probably just give up.

I started this in the hope of saving a bit of time

 

Funny how that works!

VistaPE works fine from NTFS partitions, so for the external USB I would use PM8 to format the unallocated space as a primary partition, NTFS, with 4 kB cluster size, and make the partition active. Watch PM8, however. It has this habit of automatically hiding all other primary partitions when you make another primary partition active. Check to make sure all of your partitions are unhidden before exiting PM8.

Then use your Vista DVD to create a Vista bootsector for this partition, then copy your VistaPE CD contents to the partition.

The drive also needs to have a standard MBR on it, but if you used PM8 to set it up then it should already have one. A quick look using DD's hex editor to view sector 0 should tell you (compare with your previously posted picture of sector 0 on the flash drive).

 

Before I go down that road, to use PM8 I normally reboot into the XP system on the Vista comp and use it from there. It was previously said to boot PM8 from CD, but mine doesn't. All you can do with it is to create bootable floppies - not much use on a modern PC! If I tried really hard I'm sure I could create a bootable CD with PM8 on it, but that's a lot of faff.

So is it OK to use PM8 from XP for this? (The DD trial version won't let you create new partitions AFAIK)

EDIT - Q. has answered itself - you can't set another partition Active when running PM8 from Windows.