[ltp] Failure to boot from external USB thumb drive

[Joerg Bruehe]

Hi!


I am absolutely no authority in this area, but as everybody else seems 
to remain silent, I will offer my tiny pieces:

On 30.03.21 23:52, zed wrote:
> [[...]]
> 
> There is no problem accessing external USB thumb drives containing 
> audio,data or video but there is no success booting an ISO.

Are you sure you created a bootable stick? AIUI, it is not sufficient to 
copy any ISO boot image to a stick, rather it must be a "hybrid" one.
(Sorry, I don't know a way to tell whether an ISO image is a hybrid one.
I'm still searching for one. In Ubuntu, there are packages 
"usb-creator-gtk" and "usb-creator-kde" to create bootable sticks. The 
German Ubuntu users wiki says you can use them on an arbitrary ISO boot 
image.)

Did you connect the USB stick via the docking station, or did you 
connect it directly to a port on the laptop?
I know that some USB hubs don't let you boot from an attached stick, I 
assume they don't pass "stick is bootable" to the BIOS.
Maybe the hub in the docking station is one of those?
So if you didn't use a direct laptop port till now, you might try that.

> 
> I follow the approved sequence.
> 
> Boot the computer and Press Enter and when asked choose F12 to go into 
> the Options menu
> 
> The options menu appears but there is no choice to boot from the 
> external USB thumb drive. I have used Adata, Emtec, and Sandisk 
> drives,without success.

AIUI, the stick must already be attached when the BIOS comes up.
Maybe you include that in the "approved sequence", but I'd rather 
mention it explicitly.
You might even connect the stick, power on the laptop, and then issue a 
reset first before you enter the options menu.

> 
> [[...]]
> 
> If I burn the ISO to a DVD drive and attach an external DVD to the 
> computer,the option to boot from the DVD appears and I have no trouble 
> booting. The major problem,of course,is this methods is so slow :-(

Agreed.
But if you then want to run this software for some time, you might speed 
that up by attaching the USB stick and then doing a "chroot" into it.
You would still run the kernel from the DVD, but that is already in RAM, 
so the DVD slowness would not affect you after the chroot.


HTH and Good Luck!

Jörg

-- 
Joerg Bruehe  - persoenliche Aeusserung / speaking only for himself
mailto:jb.news1 at web.de