We're having some success. The total boot time is scaled down to 25 minutes flat
I've updated the time table but this time I've shown the time span that the cursor is sitting idle on the screen, indicating reading from the pen drive.
...............................................................................
......
GRUB Loading stage1.5.
GRUB loading, please wait...
[0.00.00]-[0.02.25]
(showing grub menu and waiting for 10 seconds)
Booting 'Zeroshell - Net Services * IDE/SATA/USB Version *'
root (hd0,0)
[0.02.40]-[0.02.50]
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz ramdisk_size=131072 quiet
[0.02.50]-[0.03.35]
[Linux-bzImage, setup=0x2a00, size=0x1e111c]
[0.03.35]-[0.14.00]
initrd /initrd.gz
[0.14.00]-[0.23.15]
[Linux-initrd @ 0xfe3e000, 0x191c76 bytes]
cat /grub/zeroshell.txt
[0.23.15]-[0.24.00]
Decompressing Linux... done
Booting the kernel.
...
[0.25.00]
System up and running
And by using the sizes of vmlinuz and initrd.gz and the time the cursor sits idle, my math tells me that it reads with a speed of 3Kb/s
(1 970 460 / 1024) / 630 = 3,05440848 (vmlinuz)
(1 645 686 / 1024) / 555 = 2,89570313 (initrd.gz)
Still not a system I'd have running live, but progress none the less.
I really appreciate the time and effort you're putting into this Elmer