[plug] booting from USB CD-ROM

[Tomasz Grzegurzko]

On 5/1/06, Kev <kdownes at tpg.com.au> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> --
> =======================================================================
> Kev Downes
> kdownes at tpg.com.au  ph 0404 7 0808 2
> We use and recommend Xandros 3.0.2
> =======================================================================
> There are 10 types of people ...
>     ... those who understand binary, and those who don't!
> =======================================================================
> "Jesus Christ is the centre of everything and the object of everything;
> He who does not know him, knows nothing of the order of the world
> and nothing of himself."             Blaise Pascal
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>
I'd say you've got the general idea. The BIOS is detecting the drive,
booting from it, so its done its bit. What I think would be helpful to
see is an output of
# dmesg
after linux boots (hopefully you can get to a console before it halts,
otherwise you may need to pass boot parameters to see what is
happening). This will show us whether the drive was even detected by
the kernel loading...

Tomasz