Boot Debian?

[Davide]

Hey you've done a great work!
I've assembled a diskless desktop zero noise no fans and would like to boot debian already installed in a usb flashkey all ready to boot, with kernel and grub in his mbr.

The target system doesn't obviously support usb boot, but i've tested that throught plop manager on a floppy, it successfully boots the basic grub shell off a usb pen.

The trouble is that once in the shell, I can't look at the usb disk at all, like it were lunched directly without the plop support (eg. by a grub floppy).
If in the pendrive mbr instead of the shell I put the preconfigured boot loader, a get an "error 21" that usefully stands for "unknow error occured".

So have i missed something or is plop manager that can't chainload another boot loader??

[Elmar]

hi,
chainloading other loaders from usb is no problem. the boot manager primary emulates the usb device as first harddisk, loads the mbr and starts the mbr program. it does not matter what type of program is in the mbr.

how did you install grub on the usb device? maybe its a geometry problem.

best regards
elmar

[Davide]

Yes I think you're right: i've setted the partition to start from the first cylinder. If mbr belongs to this cylinder, installing grub could have deleted some needed information

I've re-done all starting from second cylinder. It booted!

I've still some trouble to fix, perhaps  due to too little ram, but considering that i've never booted usb at all, the hard (for me) is gone.

However you've done a good work.
Too bad we are so few people!