[ltp] Thinkpads can not boot from flash drive?

[Joel Ebel]

By the way, the BIOS probably won't show your pen drive in the list of 
bootable devices unless it is actually bootable, so make sure the drive 
is set up properly.  You need a goot master boot record at the beginning 
of the drive.  You can get one from the syslinux package.

dd if=mbr.bin of=/dev/sda

Then make sure you have the first partition bootable with fdisk.  Make 
sure the bootable flag is set on sda1.  Then install syslinux on sda1 
with "syslinux /dev/sda1"  There are some restrictions to syslinux, such 
as it must be FAT16 with a cluster size no greater then 16K and the 
filesystem can't extend past 1024 cylinders.  With a 128 MB drive, you 
most likely don't have any of these restrictions with the possible 
exception of it being formatted FAT32, which is still unlikely.  You may 
want to check to be sure though.

Best of luck.  I have a lot of experience with this from desiging my own 
distribution to do it, so if you have any questions, let me know.

Joel

Joel Ebel wrote:
> I develop a USB distribution on my Thinkpad T40. 
> (http://www.ncsu.edu/project/runt)  So the T40 definitely supports it. I 
> don't know whether or not any other laptop supports USB booting since 
> the T40 is all I have, but if it does, it should show up in the BIOS 
> boot order or the F12 menu.  So it sounds like yours doesn't support it. 
>  You can also boot from a floppy, CDROM or hard drive but still mount 
> the root filesystem on the pen drive.
> 
> Joel
> 
> Martin Gramatke wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have a little 128MB USB flash drive here with a complete, bootable 
>> linux
>> desktop. See http://www.damnsmalllinux.org
>>
>> It works great even old computers from the last decade, but not on my
>> Thinkpad X24!
>>
>> I tried all options from the F12 menu. I fiddled in the bios setup to no
>> avail.
>>
>> Am I doing something wrong?
>>
>> Are all Thinkpads that deficient? Can you boot from a usb flash drive?
>>
>> regards
>> Martin
>>