dual boot from USB hdd??

[stevensol]

Ok well I am an extreme noob to the Linux OS. I was just curious as to how it worked so I tried the Knoppix livecd and loved it. i found out that Knoppix was based on debian so that led me here.

Anyways... I booted from the current binary1 iso and installed debian on a 20 GB Archos USB drive. The installation went well, it partitioned my drive and all. Now I have a few questions... I have XP and I'm wanting to get a dual boot screen on startup, is there a line I can add to my boot.ini file to tell my pc to boot Debian from my USB hd, if not how would I go about this. Also, after partioning my drive I found that Windows doesn't recognize the drive anymore, it sees the partitions but there are no drive letters attached, I'm guessing because all of the partitions are in a linux fs. Also, I know my mobo can boot from USB but it's not seeming to work... I set ALL of my boot devices to "USBFDD" "USBCDROM" and "USBZIP". Not one of them worked. My basic problem is I'm wanting to be able to either boot XP or boot Debian from my USB hd. All and any help is appreciated.

[stevensol]

ya'll are a real help.

[andykryst]

ive never installed linux on a usb drive but after installation it should have asked you where you want to install grub. you must not have answered that question. you might be screwed, next time load grub to you MBR it should dual boot xp and debian.

as for your boot.ini i am not sure. i dont use windows. im sure there is docs somewhere.

[bigtomrodney]

If you set the device to permanently boot from USB first you can edit lilo/grub to boot the local machine. I'm sure it's possible to edit boot.ini but you would need to find out the full path to the USB device.... As in copying your bootsector to a file called linuxboot at c:\ and multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\linuxboot

That's all in the air that last part, but configuring grub or lilo should be easy enough. Check out dome of the threads already here on that.

[stevensol]

ive never installed linux on a usb drive but after installation it should have asked you where you want to install grub. you must not have answered that question. you might be screwed, next time load grub to you MBR it should dual boot xp and debian.

as for your boot.ini i am not sure. i dont use windows. im sure there is docs somewhere.

well see it DID install grub into my MBR... but I got error 17 or error 21, it was one of those, lol when It came to the boot sequence. And I couldnt boot windows or debian. it basically screwed up my mbr, and I had to boot xp from the cd and repair my mbr.

[andykryst]

i had a problem that was sort of the same thing cept i was getting rid of ubuntu. i figured i would give it another try, it didnt suit me. i deleted the partion split it in two and reformated it set one as my /home and then reinstalled grub.

i just ran grub and set up the root, it found stage 1 and stage 2 and the maps and all was good.

i hope it all works out for ya man. sorry i wasnt much help.

[stevensol]

i had a problem that was sort of the same thing cept i was getting rid of ubuntu. i figured i would give it another try, it didnt suit me. i deleted the partion split it in two and reformated it set one as my /home and then reinstalled grub.

i just ran grub and set up the root, it found stage 1 and stage 2 and the maps and all was good.

i hope it all works out for ya man. sorry i wasnt much help.

its all good. im just tryin to learn as much as possible, and I have too much valuable data on my XP partition that i dont really wanna mess with it, especially cuz I'm new to even partitioning a drive. And I don't really have enough space anywhwere to back up all of the data I would want to keep safe, if you get my drift. Im just really wantin this USB boot to work cuz I have nothing to lose If I mess the installation up.

[IsaacKuo]

I'm currently experimenting with booting Debian from a USB drive. In my motherboard's BIOS, it thinks of USB drives as hard drives grouped together with all other hard drives. In order to get it to boot from a USB drive, I needed to modify the hard drive boot priority--so it tried to boot from the USB drive before other hard drives.

This motherboard also had options for booting from USB floppy, USB zip, USB CDROM. None of those were applicable to a USB hard drive.

[stevensol]

I'm currently experimenting with booting Debian from a USB drive. In my motherboard's BIOS, it thinks of USB drives as hard drives grouped together with all other hard drives. In order to get it to boot from a USB drive, I needed to modify the hard drive boot priority--so it tried to boot from the USB drive before other hard drives.

This motherboard also had options for booting from USB floppy, USB zip, USB CDROM. None of those were applicable to a USB hard drive.

Ok, I was thinking the same thing. where were you able to edit the hard drive boot priority? nothing to do with master or slave drives does it?

edit--- ok i found my hard disk boot priorty in my bios, but the only option were my XP drive and an option called 'bootable plugged in cards.' I don't think my bios is even seeing my USB drive, is that possible? Also, would the physical port that it's plugged into have anything do with it? It's plugged directly into my mobo.