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Re: [LUG] USB boot

 

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:29:00 -0700 (PDT), trewornan wrote:
> 
> Sunday I had a computer meltdown and had to install Ubuntu from a USB
> stick - I tried with a KingMax 4GB. I like these because they're the most
> compact I've come across and fit nicely on a keyring. I was going to
leave
> it on this stick so I could use it anywhere/anywhen in future. But I
> couldn't get it to boot. After trying a lot of other things I eventually
> tried again using a Kingston Traveller 2GB job and it worked perfectly.
> 
> I can't explain this: before I loaded the KingMax up via Unetbootin I set
> it up as a single FAT32 partition and marked it bootable same as with the
> Kingston. The only odd thing I can find is that the KingMax although it
> says 4GB actually the partition (which as far as I can see covers the
> entire memory) says 3.8GB. Is it possible there's some peculiar
proprietary
> partitioning that isn't apparent under normal usage.
> 
> Any suggestions?

I've had problems like this with drives that come with "U3" installed
on them.  Once this has been removed the drive seems to work like a
bog-standard USB storage device... unfortunately when I needed to do
this last I hadn't found a way to remove U3 from within Linux.  U3 have
a removal tool themselves, but it has to be run from within Windows.

Also, make sure that you are using a partition on the drive.  Although
you *can* create a filesystem on the entire disk (ie sda rather than
sda1), it really isn't a good idea... alas, some pendrive manufacturers
seem to still do this!  Blat it, partition it, format it, unetbootin it!

Grant.


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