Tiny Core Base > TCB Q&A Forum
How do I boot USB via boot floppy?
secdroid:
I have an old laptop that boots DSL 4.x from a USB stick via the DSL boot floppy. (The DSL boot floppy loaded a tiny linux with USB drivers sufficient to load and boot the DSL image from the USB stick, even though the system BIOS didn't support USB booting.)
The TC boot floppy appears to be an entirely different sort of beast: just GRUB stanzas pointing to (hd0,1).
--- How can I boot TC from USB stick when the BIOS doesn't understand USB booting?
--- If I make a USB Linux swap partition (and do mkswap on that partition), will TC automagically find it or do I need to specify it somewhere? (Minimal RAM available.)
TIA and I hope I didn't miss the answer in my searches.
tobiaus:
i have not seen a solution to this either. someone had a similar goal with dsl-n, the larger 2.6 kernel version of dsl: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/f/viewpost/2363.html
he was able to setup dsl to do what he wanted, then simply copy the right dsl-n images (ie manual frugal install) over the dsl images. i think there are only two, bzImage and tinycore.gz in tc.
no one was able to tell him if it mattered or if his idea was not recommended, but i'm not sure the dsl-n forums ever did very well.
with tc there is the additional issue of boot scripts probably being entirely different between dsl-n and tinycore. is that an issue here? i won't make an ignorant guess in an attempt to be helpful. i wouldn't give up yet, but i don't know if there is an official answer to your question (...yet!) if there is one, i just wasted your time. if there won't be one, i would use these hints in your attempt.
edit: unless the dsl boot floppy has the same problem as the grub in dsl: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=353.msg2211#msg2211
secdroid:
--- Quote from: tobiaus on January 02, 2009, 03:42:56 PM ---i have not seen a solution to this either. someone had a similar goal with dsl-n, the larger 2.6 kernel i wouldn't give up yet, but i don't know if there is an official answer to your question (...yet!) if there is one, i just wasted your time. if there won't be one, i would use these hints in your attempt.
--- End quote ---
Thanks for the pointer. It turns out that the situation with my old laptop matches the post you cited: no HD and dead CD. Certainly worth learning from what he did.
I realize that there may be no "official" solution, near-term or ever. There are certainly higher priority issues for a young distro.
Still, I like what I see when I boot the TC CD on another machine and would like to use 2.6 Linux on the old laptop in order to take advantage of the networking improvements.
Long term, I plan to put a CF adapter inside the laptop's HD bay. I may end up using DSL via floppy/pendrive to bootstrap into installing a bootable TC on internal CF. DSL already put the machine on the network, which is a major part of the battle.
^thehatsrule^:
I think that contains a syslinux boot image with the kernel and initrd added to it (and a customized syslinux.cfg)
TC's initrd is ~10M though, so it will not fit on a conventional floppy. Perhaps there is a bootloader that supports reading off usb devices...? In that case you could just change the .cfg for that to read the initrd off the usb device.
roberts:
There are solutions out there. In fact they may have matured since last I looked.
The solution that I have/use uses a Panasonic DOS/USB driver. I make a minimal DOS boot floppy with this driver.
Then using linld (or is it ldlin? ) bootloader, I can boot from floppy, see the USB pendrive as drive D:
Then using a DOS bat file load and run Tiny Core.
I will post more later.
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