Plop USB boot - multiple USB devices

[Јаневски]

Hello,

I have noticed that booting from USB flash drive while another USB device such as USB ethernet card is attached could fail.

Also, I've noticed that booting from 8GB and bigger size USB flash drives on a particular older ECS board P4VXASD2+ with AMI BIOS always fails, however on other machines it works nicely.
The only tested scenario that worked well on this machine is with 512MB flash drive.

Any advice is appreciated

[Elmar]

hello,

I have noticed that booting from USB flash drive while another USB device such as USB ethernet card is attached could fail.

in such a case you can

• swap the devices that the flash drive is detected at first
• 
  or you can configure the boot manager to ignore the first device
  
• or you use the ALT-U hotkey to skip devices

Also, I've noticed that booting from 8GB and bigger size USB flash drives on a particular older ECS board P4VXASD2+ with AMI BIOS always fails, however on other machines it works nicely.

how exactly does it fail? what do you see on the screen?

regards
elmar

[Јаневски]

hello,

I have noticed that booting from USB flash drive while another USB device such as USB ethernet card is attached could fail.

in such a case you can

• swap the devices that the flash drive is detected at first
• 
  or you can configure the boot manager to ignore the first device
  
• or you use the ALT-U hotkey to skip devices

Also, I've noticed that booting from 8GB and bigger size USB flash drives on a particular older ECS board P4VXASD2+ with AMI BIOS always fails, however on other machines it works nicely.

how exactly does it fail? what do you see on the screen?

regards
elmar

Yes that's what i've been doing with the USB devices, I let only the USB flash connected, and after it starts booting from USB then I attach the USB NIC, however in such situation I have a problem with remote rebooting.
The USB device recognition seems to be random (actually first detected first recognized), sometimes it detects the flash drive first and there is no problem, however sometimes it detects the NIC as a first USB device and it gets stuck with "Loading plpt.bin..." on the screen.

About the second scenario, with the bigger USB drives it prints only "_" on the upper left corner of the screen and gets stuck.
With similar class old ECS P6VXAT board which has Award BIOS there is no problem, I've checked even with 16GB USB flash drive.

I forgot to mention, I'm using Debian 6.0.5 with GRUB installed on one wholesize bootable partition on the flash drives, no swap partition or anything else.

[Elmar]

The USB device recognition seems to be random (actually first detected first recognized), sometimes it detects the flash drive first and there is no problem, however sometimes it detects the NIC as a first USB device and it gets stuck with "Loading plpt.bin..." on the screen.

it only looks like random. the ports are wired and have always the same number. when you think the nic was detected first, then there was a problem with the usb drive detection and the drive has been skipped.

for testing, did you try an usb drive from another manufacture? you should also try the force usb 1.1 option. its slower, but maybe it helps.

About the second scenario, with the bigger USB drives it prints only "_" on the upper left corner of the screen and gets stuck.
With similar class old ECS P6VXAT board which has Award BIOS there is no problem, I've checked even with 16GB USB flash drive.

I forgot to mention, I'm using Debian 6.0.5 with GRUB installed on one wholesize bootable partition on the flash drives, no swap partition or anything else.

you can use plopKexec as alternative