Unable to boot "custom" USB (edit... EHCI freezes when encountering USB 1.1)

[TheJayMann]

Recently, I tried using Chromium OS (Hexxah build) on my laptop, but my laptop doesn't support boot from USB.  I used plop to boot from USB, and it worked, the Chromium logo showed up, Ctrl+Alt+F2 shows the developer console, but the OS itself wouldn't start (not sure what went wrong).  So, I decided to reformat/repartition the USB with custom Debian, and I've tried both grub and extlinux, but when booting from USB, plop freezes, after the message HOST 1.  I'm wondering if this is known, or if I was just lucky with the Chromium setup, or if I'm not properly formatting the USB to be recognized as bootable.  Later today I'll be trying to setup syslinux (I followed steps for making a bootable FAT partition from Windows using DISKPART) to see if it works.

I've seen other posts which seem to describe the same problem I have now, but those seem to be not working at all, whereas for me it was able to work just fine with one setup, but failed to work with another setup.

[TheJayMann]

I'm going to mark this as fixed.  Yesterday, I installed syslinux on Windows, as well copied over the Knoppix kernel.  Plop was able to successfully boot syslinux, and syslinux the Knoppix kernel (which hung, obviously, as I didn't have the Knoppix initrd or userland).  I continue installing debian on the second partition (that I set up as ext4), and Plop hung at Host 1 again, even though no changes to the boot loader (neither MBR nor partition bootloader) occured.  I then read somewhere about using shift to change the USB drivers (something like between EHCI and UHCI (or whatever the acronyms are)) and it now started to work every time.

My guess is some built in USB device (since the pen drive is the only externam USB device connected) was being rather fritzy, sometimes allowing Plop to continue, other times halting it.

[TheJayMann]

After doing a lot of testing, I've noticed that my laptop has two hosts (each with two ports).  Host 1 is USB 1.1, and Host 2 is USB 2.0.  Except for four times (coincedently, the three times I tried a Chromium image, and the one time I tried syslinux with KNOPPIX kernel) the EHCI drivers managed to read the USB device connected to Host 2.  Every other time, the EHCI drivers would hang on Host 1.  I managed to boot with UHCI, but this, of course, slows down loading the kernel and initrd (at about 10MB, syslinux "freezes" for 8-12 seconds, compared to about 5-8 seconds from booting from kernel to graphics).  Is it possible to skip a host controller completely, to potentially prevent this hanging?  Or are the EHCI drivers supposed to skip over the USB 1.1 controllers, and is just failing to do so in my case?  The option to skip USB devices doesn't work, as it still probes Host 1, likely to find the devices so it can skip them.