Linux Question

[Hotelsincarmel]

Linux Question - How can I load the GRUB loader and have it support USB if the BIOS doesnt have that option?

I have this old Lappy that doesnt have a working HDD. So ive been on a quest to get it to boot some OS off a USB drive. This is quite difficult because it doesnt have BIOS support for booting USB. Ive been playing around with linux and GRUB and stuff lately. So what im after is:

A Floppy or CD that BOOTS GRUB and has USB support.
So it Loads USB drivers or something, and then can boot whatever i choose. For Example, if i tell it to boot from the Win98 IO.sys file, it should boot thta way. The only issue i have is, as i have said, that the BIOS doesnt natively support USB booting.

Anyway, Any help is appreciated.
Thanks

[UncasMS]

do i get this right:

you want to boot from a live-cd (because you cant from usb) and you want to work from this live-cd but write/save to any usb media?

if so: almost all newer live cd distros should enable you to do so or am i missing something here?

[atifsh]

if ur bios cant support usb boot then im afraid it wont work, u need to boot from live cd and use usb as storage after.

[atifsh]

A Floppy or CD that BOOTS GRUB and has USB support.
So it Loads USB drivers or something, and then can boot whatever i choose.

when ur bios cant see usb as storage, doesnt matter if u do whatever with grub, cause at bios level usb is not available

[MilesAhead]

Your only chance may be a boot diskette that points into the USB drive storage. It was common in Linux to make a boot floppy that mounted the Linux installation from the HD.

If it's possible they should know about it here:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/

[atifsh]

but his only problem as far i know is... the bios will not recognize the usb storage before booting into linux, so it wont work.

[MilesAhead]

It doesn't boot the USB. It boots the floppy. The floppy then mounts the USB. So the USB driver would have to be part of the boot floppy. Same thing on my desktop. The optical drive and the HD both run off the same raid controller. The boot CD of image restore program did not have the raid driver. Since that also ran the optical the only thing I had to work with was the 1.44 MB boot image on the CD that bios sees as a floppy. Booting that with WinPE loads the Windows raid driver, now I can see the rest of the optical stuff and the HD. You have to boot strap it rolling your own.

[atifsh]

yes i understand u but my question, if bios doesnt see usb in the first place, does the floppy still loads it ?

bios cant boot usb is different then bios cant see usb isn't?

iv seen 2 systems one can see usb but cant boot, other just dont see if usb is placed at bios.

[MilesAhead]

Why does the bios have to see the USB drive? You are booting a floppy. The floppy has Linux OS with Linux drivers for USB. Once you are running Linux, the bios is out of the picture. If the Linux driver can handle USB 2.0 and can handle the file system that's on the USB drive, what's the bios got to do? If you are loading Linux off the USB then supposedly the USB and the floppy diskette will be running the same file system, such as ext3 or whatever, and the USB drive will be mounted on a mount point on the Linux file system that is running. (In fact it's been awhile since I did Linux.. it doesn't have to be a same file system, that branch in the tree under that mount point would have a file system type noted, just as if you mounted a NTFS or Dos partition onto it. It has has to be a file system Linux can handle.)

It's kind of like Windows 3.1. You could boot into Dos, then run Windows.com to bring up the GUI.
Linux diskette doesn't boot from the HD. It boot from diskette, mounts the drive, does the startup scripts that loads Linux OS that is on the HD into memory, then changes the root of the file system to the HD.

The same should be possible for USB. Linux doesn't really care about bios once it has control. It did logical block addressing on large HD years and years before it was done in Windows.

I don't know why it wouldn't work unless you are telling me the drivers call bios functions for USB initialization, which would mean the USB wouldn't work under Windows either. Why would someone have that in their machine? Dead weight? I don't think it likely.

[atifsh]

point taken and understood

my confusion was iv seen a system where BIOS dosnt see usb and if i use acronis rescue media it doesnt show usb disk or usb writer. but after it loads windows usb works.

[MilesAhead]

point taken and understood

my confusion was iv seen a system where BIOS dosnt see usb and if i use acronis rescue media it doesnt show usb disk or usb writer. but after it loads windows usb works.

I know what you mean. It gets confusing. I kind of hate how they stick everything on one controller in fake SCSI on some of these systems. If you can't see your HD because it's fake RAID chances are the optical drive is also on the thing. Just complicates everything when they could just stick in another chip for 1/10th of a cent.