kernel presentation at ILUG on Sat.

[Jason Clinton]

Jason Clinton wrote:

> Charles Steinkuehler wrote:
>
>> Have you tried anything other than grub?  I believe syslinux will
>> work with USB devices (but require a FAT boot partition), and you
>> might have better luck with lilo.
>>
>> Have you installed grub by hand on an alternate drive before?   It
>> can be kind of tricky...exact commands and error messages would help
>> diagnose exactly what's going wrong.
>>
> No, I haven't tried anything but grub and yes, I didn't it manually,
> command by command. I think I'll try lilo, now that you recommended it.
>
> When I get home, I'll try installing grub to sda again and see what
> the exact error message is.

Here is the output of the kernel when the drive is inserted:

usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0x5dc/0x100) is not claimed by any active driver.
Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Vendor: LEXAR     Model: ATA FLASH         Rev: V1.0
Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 503808 512-byte hdwr sectors (258 MB)
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 2
USB Mass Storage support registered.

Here is the output of grub when I attempt to place the bootloader on the
media with a reference to the grub files on my IDE drive.

grub> root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

grub> setup (h2)

Error 23: Error while parsing number

grub> setup (hd2)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd2)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 d (hd2) (hd2)1+16 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage
2 /boot/grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
Done.

I could have sworn I was getting an error message before, but I guess
not. The BIOS skips right over the USB flash drive (I see the light
blink as though it looked for the MBR). I tried both USB FDD and USB ZIP
bootable options. The BIOS post messages display that it has detected a
"JumpDrive 2.0 removable storage device".

So I tried LILO too:

boot=/dev/sda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
lba32
default=linux

image=/boot/bzImage
label=linux
read-only
root=/dev/hda3

Output of /sbin/lilo:

Warning: BIOS drive 0x82 may not be accessible
Warning: /dev/sda is not on the first disk
Warning: Unable to determine video adapter in use in the present system.
Added linux *

And then I reboot and it just skips over it again after looking for an
MBR and not finding one.

Like I said, I don't have a clue where to go from here.

--
Jason Clinton
I don't believe in witty sigs.