[plug] booting from USB CD-ROM

[Kev]

I have a USB2 CD-ROM drive and I can't boot from it.  It's a
Welland ME-340U2 5.25" Aluminium Enclosure USB 2.0

Let me explain.

I set the CMOS to boot from the "USB CD-ROM".
Connect the CD drive and reboot
The drive is found and the boot process commences.
Depending on the OS, the process gets "so far" and halts.
This is true for Xandros, Ubuntu Live, eCS, Windows, Knoppix.

So, obviously the CMOS is doing its bit and finding the USB device to 
boot from.  Being a completely non-tech ludite, I'm guessing that when 
the CMOS hands control over to the OS, the device is getting lost.  ie, 
the OS no longer knows where it's coming from.  With the Linux OSes I 
can confirm that the kernel is loading well before it all goes toes up. 
  I've tried this on 3 completely different machines :-

Asus m/b with 1.6g P4 iNtel
MSI m/b with AMD AthlonXP 2800+
DFI m/b with AMD64 3200+

I figure that's a big enough sample to discount hardware being the 
problem.  Each of said machines otherwise works perfectly.

I thought that USB drives were, amongst other things, useful for 
installing an OS where there is no useable internal CD drive - that's 
partly what I bought it for.

Can someone out there in PLUGland please help me get this thing going. 
Next after that I want to install Linux to a USB hard drive so that I 
can boot from it.

TIA
Kev


-- 
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Kev Downes
kdownes at tpg.com.au  ph 0404 7 0808 2
We use and recommend Xandros 3.0.2
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