PLoP hangs when trying to boot a USB key

Started by lev, April 12, 2010, 17:04:49 PM

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lev

Hi,

I've installed a Linux distro (openSUSE) on a 8 GB Transcend USB key. It boots OK on a recent laptop (whose BIOS allows booting from USB).

To boot it on an older laptop, I made a PLoP bootmanager floppy. The floppy drive is a USB one. PLoP starts OK. Then I plug my key in the other USB port, and hit Ctrl-Shift-U. PLoP detects the Transcend device. Then I hit enter and I'm taken back to the console screen with a bit more than a linefull of periods, with the blinking cursor, and nothing more happens.

FWIW, here's the partition table cfdisk sees on the USB key:
               First       Last
# Type       Sector      Sector   Offset    Length   Filesystem Type (ID) Flag
-- ------- ----------- ----------- ------ ----------- -------------------- ----
1 Primary           0       48194     63       48195 W95 FAT16 (LBA) (0E) Boot
2 Primary       48195     2152709      0     2104515 Linux swap / So (82) None
3 Primary     2152710    15679439      0    13526730 Linux (83)           None

(There are two other views available but I think this one is the most relevant.)

Thanks for your help.

Elmar

hi,
can you post the "lspci -v" output of the machine?

regards
elmar

lev

Quote from: Elmar on April 12, 2010, 20:48:54 PMcan you post the "lspci -v" output of the machine?
Thanks for answering.

The older laptop has no Linux installed. I'll have to boot a rescue system DVD. It might be in a few days, so maybe you could tell me now what kind of info you're after, and other commands to run depending of what lspci will give.

Elmar


michiganbroadband

#4
Had a question but figured it out.. :-)
Seems I can't delete my comment/post but I can change it to this..
Sorry about that.

lev

Quote from: michiganbroadband on April 14, 2010, 17:31:42 PMHad a question but figured it out.. :-)
Got it by email... Nice to see you figured it out, that proves I expressed myself well enough to be understood  ;)

lev

Quote from: lev on April 13, 2010, 10:56:29 AMI'll have to boot a rescue system DVD. It might be in a few days, so maybe you could tell me now what kind of info you're after, and other commands to run depending of what lspci will give.
:'( My DVD-ROM drive refuses to read the openSUSE install DVD from which I wanted to boot a rescue system. (Booting from CDROM directly via the BIOS menu yields some kind of "bad media" message, and trying to boot via PLoP gives a red "CDROM error".)

Do you know any Linux floppy distro containing lspci? (The few I found up to now only have dmesg.)

Elmar

Quote from: lev on April 15, 2010, 10:12:20 AM
Do you know any Linux floppy distro containing lspci? (The few I found up to now only have dmesg.)

no

are you sure its a dvd drive and not only a cdrom drive?


lev

Well, I found this which is able to probe PCI devices: Hardware Detection Tool, http://hdt-project.org/wiki . Tell me if it's enough or if you really need Linux's lspci.

I had to copy data by hand, so I wrote down only the parts which looked relevant to me, but still I listed all the devices reported by HDT. (blanks mean I didn't copy the given value, it's not necessarily empty)
Manufacturer     Class                        Name                              Location  PCI ID                IRQ  Latency
ALi Corporation  Host bridge                  M1644/M1644T Northbridge+Trident  00:00.0   10b9:1644[0000:0000]
ALi Corporation  PCI bridge                   PCI to AGP controller             00:01.0   10b9:5247[0000:0000]
ALi Corporation  USB controller               USB 1.1 controller                00:02.0   10b9:5237[1179:0004]  11   64
ALi Corporation  IDE interface                M5229 IDE                         00:03.0   10b9:5229[1179:0004]
ALi Corporation  Multimedia audio controller                                    etc.                            11
ALi Corporation  ISA bridge                                                               10b9:1533[1179:0004]
ALi Corporation  Bridge                       M7101 pow. man. controller
Intel            Ethernet                                                                                       11
TI               Cardbus bridge
Toshiba          Cardbus bridge
Toshiba          Cardbus bridge
Toshiba          Sys. peripheral              SDtypA controller                                                 11
Trident          VGA compatible controller                                                                      11

lev


Elmar

i released a new version. can you try it.

lev

Quote from: Elmar on April 23, 2010, 10:14:05 AM
i released a new version. can you try it.
Whoo hoo hoooooooooooooo, that works!
I'm posting this from my USB Linux  ;D
BTW, the version that didn't work was 5.0.4-2 (I think I downloaded it a while ago, but only recently had I time to post here).

Thanks a lot!
Cheers,
L.