General :: Old Sony BIOS Use USB Flash Drive - Stick - For Booting
Feb 18, 2011
I probably have not done any serious programming for 20 years, not counting a little HTML.
I stumbled onto an old FREESPIRE disk my bro sent me several years back -- and tried installing it on a Sony Vaio PCG FRV 28 I had crashed a few years back. The Sony bios is still aboard, but old enough to not have USB "booting" as part of the boot menu. I don't even know if one can easily hack into the BIOS on an old sony Vaio but changing the BIOS would solve lot of problems.
Does anyone have any ideas or certain knowledge on rewriting or modifying the Master Boot Code or an idea on making my USB [with Ubuntu or any other Linux implementation visible] and bootable to the bios on powerup?
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Jan 13, 2010
How to put ophcrack on linux because of my supposed intentions of plugging it in waiting 20 mins and cracking passwords wherever people do this I know having to waste my space triple booting the thing with Ophcrack XP/Vista and BackTrack. How does one go about dual booting a flash drive? I could not find much on the internet.
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Jul 10, 2010
I have an HP motherboard w/P4 with 40 GB disk another Maxtor 500GB Hard disk on the usb. Problem: On start up with device selection for booting, my pen drive always gets listed as USB HDD0 and USB HDD1 and Iam able to boot thru' them. However my Maxtor HDD in the first partition of which I have installed FC 13 after much pain,so as to not disturb my existing installation FC 11 in internal drive. This device itself is not visible, nothing to have to say about its partitions in bios list of devices to select. Whether this is a drive related problem or bios related. How may I make it visible in bios list.
Further note: Fedora core 13 installation didn't worry about the windows XP and Fedora 11 installation in main drive. It allowed for installation of the individual boot loader in the installation drive itself.
Bios not recognising this drive precluded access at boot from grub.conf of the exising FC 11 installation too.
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Jul 17, 2010
I have a Sony VAIO AR series, it contains two separate 120GB hard drives that were originally configured in a raid. They're called hd0, and hd1. I disabled the raid and partitioned hd1 in 3 ways, one medium sized partition for the operating system (ext4), one large partition for storage (ext4) and one small partition for Swap space. I then installed Ubuntu onto hd1 with help from UNetbootin. After installation went fine I loaded up Windows installer, created two NTFS partitions, one medium and one large, and installed Windows 7 of the medium sized partition. Now I can't figure out how to boot into the Ubuntu side on hd1. Needless to say, in Windows, hd1 is not visable at all. I can see my two NTFS partitions fine.
When booting up I go through two main screens. The first screen "Matrix Storage Manager Option ROM," lists the physical disks (0, and 1.) and gives me the option to enter configuration with [cntrl+i]. The second screen gives me a list of options to boot from, Yet they are all Windows options and many are redundant. The list includes "Enter Command Line," which when selected tells me "Boot failed! Press any key to enter command line." command line brings me to "grub>" I tried booting Ubuntu from this command line, but don't have much to work with here. I followed this guide, but it didn't take me to completion and I'm not sure where to go from here. http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.p...m_command_line
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May 8, 2011
If an old bios and mainboard is being used, such that it cannot handle the large size of HD, then is it useful to say use a live CD and from its initial menu (pressed a key), choose 'Boot From First Hard Disk'? Would this be similar in getting around a bios and disk size limitation I wonder - like - does the use of a live CD in this way avoid using the bios to point to the active partition??
The reason for asking is that a friend has a couple of quality old rack mounted server machines and wants to use Ubuntu having now fitted 80 GB empty drives. Live CD seems ok, and 11.04 install goes ok but on boot up grub comes back with an error.
I recall that early machines cannot see larger(?) HDs for booting purposes even though installs go ok in very large HDs. I wondered if a live CD to boot up temporarily - trouble shooting - would be worth trying for this reason, or am I way off?
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Mar 28, 2010
I installed Kubuntu 8.04.2 Live CD on a USB flash drive using a software program called Unetbootin (from Gentoo), and I can successfully boot into the OS with no problem but I am not able to save any changes such as preferences, because once I reboot, everything I changed or installed is lost. I guess this is because the OS is dumped into RAM and all of my changes were made in RAM instead of the USB flash drive.
My question would be is there a way (keeping my present configuration) I can save any changes to the USB flash drive so that when I reboot, the changes will stick?
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Mar 13, 2010
I ran across this webpage and was just wondering if anyone's tried this before.
[URL]
I've got a spare 1GB lexar jump drive and was thinking of trying it out.
I just wanted to know if a 1GB drive is large enough.
anyone tried a Lexar jump drive before?
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Mar 11, 2010
I have one new laptop that doesn't see one usb bootable device. The usb is a 1G with Mint8 on it that works on plenty of other systems. This is a newer HP laptop core i7 that see's two other flash drives and tries even to boot to my older flash install (only has syslinux no other files) but doesn't show the newer one in bios boot order or boot order choice F9.
It will work correctly under windows so the system does see it.
how to that that single drive to show up in order to boot to it?
Did power down, remove all usb except this one, tried to see if it fell under hard drives instead of usb.
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Dec 7, 2010
I recently bought a barebones computer kit and I need an operating system. Upon recommendation, I am considering openSUSE. Further I did not order a disc drive with my computer. This means that to boot openSUSE my only real option would be from a flash drive.
I have found an introduction on how to do it with ubuntu:
Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy Way - How-To Geek
I am interested to know if I can do a similar thing with openSUSE.
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Mar 1, 2010
So I am at my wits end trying to figure out why this won't work. I am trying to install ubuntu 9.10 on my netbook (I hear it runs better than remix) but an running into a wall. I am already using Jolicloud as my main os on my main partition. I have used Unetbootin to get the 9.10 iso on my re-movable media. I have gone into the bios and chose to have it look at the re-movable first, then my 1st partition on the HD. For some reason it never looks at the USB drive. I have disabled everything on boot except for the media and i get a screen that says "insert bootable media or restart" then i have to go back into bios and enable the HD again.
Side note, the media I am using might not be in fat 32 because I haven't figured out how to format in linux but, I have formatted in windows so that it is fat 32 and got the same problem.
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Mar 15, 2010
I have an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer, which reportedly works just fine booting Linux. It does have U3 still present on one of the partitions, but this should not pose any problems either. I also have a 2GB FAT32 partition for storing Windows stuff. The rest (5.7GB) I have reserved for Ubuntu. Windows reports this as an active partition, and the Ubuntu boot CD reports this partition as dev/sdb5. I have installed Ubuntu from the Desktop CD to the USB partition using the guided install (largest continuous free space) and selected the boot (grub) location on the same partition (sdb5), as I'd rather not modify my existing windows bootloader. A 300MB swap partition also exists on the drive. When I attempt to boot the USB drive from either my laptop (Inspiron 1505) or desktop (Abit IP35 Pro), only a blinking dash (or underscore) appears with no LED activity on the flash drive. Could it be that the MBR of the flash drive needs to be aware that the grub install is located at sdb5?
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May 28, 2010
I'm trying to make a sort of "toolkit" flash drive using grub2 but I am running into some problems. For some reason, every entry below gives me the error "you must load the kernel first" when I try to boot it. I have checked in the grub command line and it appears that grub sees my flash drive as the first drive when booting. This is what my grub.cfg looks like.
Code:
#Clonezilla v1.2.5-17
menuentry "Clonezilla 32"
{
set isofile="/boot/isos/clonezilla32.iso"
loopback loop $isofile
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Jul 14, 2010
Is it possible that grub can load usb driver because BIOS of my computer is 10 or more years older. Currently in grub if I run
root (<press tab>
I get
fd0 hd0
meaning so far floppy & hard disk can be accessed. I am using ubuntu 8.04 .
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Jun 18, 2010
"In this tutorial you will prepare a USB flash drive to make it bootable. After you booted it it shows you a menu where you can choose which live system you want to boot. So you might be interested in this tutorial if: You want to have multiple live systems on one USB flash drive In the future you want to create a new bootable live system just by copying the ISO file onto the drive and edit the grub.cfg You don't want to or can't use Distro specific LiveUSB creator tools You prefer a cleaner solution than the most LiveUSB creator tools which create several folders and files at the device root You are feeling bored and want to see cool features of Grub2 If you have a Grub2 version with Lua support you even don't need to manually edit the grub.cfg when you add new or remove live systems." Remainder of information is found here: [URL] This was found in a closed Karmic Development forum - can this be validated and updated if needed for Lucid?
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Jan 6, 2011
I am using a linux kernel 2.6.36 using mips architecture. I have succesfully booted the machine through Flash memory, but it is not booting through nfs. It is getting stuck at the stage where the image starts loading. In short the vmlinux.img file is being copied properly to nfsroot but the image is not loading.
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Nov 24, 2010
I'm about to install the Smart Boot Manager rpm so that I will be able to boot from my usb. My bios doesn't support booting up from the usb port. Will this cause conflict with grub?I currently have Fedora 14 installed and about to install CentOS 5.5.
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Jun 17, 2010
I just installed Linux Mint in my Netbook with help of USB stick. I don't have CD drive in my netbook.
Its working fine but without USB stick its not booting. If start with USB stick its booting fine.
The booting files are in USB, how do I change the booting option. so that I can boot without USB stick help.
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Apr 4, 2011
I am trying to flash my bios but they only supply an exe or a floppy image. obviosly I am not running windows to run the exe and I dont have a floppy drive. So I have been trying to copy the floppy image to a cd with little success.Size of boot image is 2884 sectors -> genisoimage: Error - boot image 'F1B.IMG' has not an allowable size.The way I understand it thats 4 sectors over the 1.44Mb floppy size? Is there a way I continue anyway? Seeing that I will be putting it on a cd I cant see that the size is going to matter
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May 11, 2010
I have CentOS 5 running on my machine "Appro 1122hi". Now i need to replace centOS with RHEL 4.
Steps Followed is, i changed the bios setting to start booting form CD.
when i try to boot form CD i get "PXE-E61 media test failure, check cable" error
Hardware details. AMD opteron processor 248, 64 bit machine and 16 GB ram.
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Mar 28, 2011
I am trying something: I would like to access to some data stored on a usb stick while I am booting to the kernel using the "init=/bin/sh" parameters.Is that possible ?My USB stick is detected when I do 'cat /var/log/messages.log | grep sdb". I had to "modprobe usb-storage".Quote:localhot kernel : sdb: sdb1localhost kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable diskBut I still can't get it mounted.Quote:mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist"
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Mar 25, 2011
I'm trying to set up a netbook with Ubuntu for my computer-challenged Mother. I downloaded the image file to the download section of the new netbook, created a USB stick to boot from and then restarted the computer, pressing F2 in order to change the boot order. Using the "+" key I was able to put [Removable Dev.] on top: "1st Boot Device", but, and here's the thing, it is disabled: "A devince enclosed in the parenthesis has been disab led in the corresponding type menu." I do not understand this, nor do I know what to do
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Dec 27, 2010
I work with many different PCs with Windows XP and Windows 7 deployed, and I'm trying to consolidate my stacks of CDs into a single USB drive. I'd like to be able to boot off it and have a choice of a few options: A persistent Linux install for troubleshooting, the Win7 install CD, and the WinXP install CD.
I'm aware that most USB sticks can't be partitioned, but after much trial and error I've found one that can have its removable bit flipped, be treated as a USB hard drive and partitioned. I can set up 4 primary partitions and an initial test with a boot cd image on the first partition seems to work on 3 of my 4 home PCs... on (only) one of them though, Grub gives a 'Missing MBR-helper' error. All my systems, even the one not booting correctly, see the partitions as valid in both Linux and Windows, and I've successfully retrieved data from all of them. My guess is that it's a BIOS quirk on that particular machine, but it puts the whole idea in jeopardy... if it doesn't work on one of my own PCs, who's to say it will work on other PCs?
I'd like to salvage the partition idea if I can, maybe someone has run into this before... But if it's just not feasible, I read that Grub can boot image files under certain circumstances... I'm wondering if it's possible to have Grub (or any other bootloader) run the Win7 and WinXP CDs as image files? That way they could all sit on a single partition on the USB stick.
I haven't yet tried any other bootloaders, for all I know I could try something else and get things going.
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Feb 9, 2011
I'm trying to boot an SD card on a notebook that does not have BIOS support for booting from the SD slot. Using various how-to's I've figured out how to add additional SD card modules to the initrd.img file on a bootable USB drive such that I can boot Linux installed on the SD card.
However, best I can tell, it loads the kernel and initrd.img from the USB and everything else from the SD card. What I really want is to load the necessary SD modules from the USB and then chainload the SD card such that whatever kernel is on the SD card is loaded instead. Is it possible to chainload to another bootable device after the kernel (with the SD module additions) has already been loaded?
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Jan 18, 2010
I've been searching the forums for any posts that cover my problem, but most of the booting problems I've found are different from mine.Anywho, the situation:ell laptop, 2 partitions, first is Windows XP, second is Ubuntu Karmic.Whenever I turn on my computer the first loading screen that shows up (is this the BIOS? Excuse my little knowledge of this stuff), before GRUB loads, is really slow. It takes about a minute to load.However, whenever I restart from my XP partition, it suddenly loads fast! And this does not happen when restarting from my Ubuntu partition or anything
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Sep 26, 2010
Ubuntu 10.04.1 to prepare a USB flash drive for use as installation media for a new computer that's on the way. When the Linux kernel tries booting up on the flash drive, I get an error saying VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,1).Here's how I got to this point...Created bootable partition on the thumb drive.Put the following files onto the flash drive: initrd.gz, vmlinuz, and ubuntu-10.04.1-server-amd64.iso fromhttp://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dis...ages/hd-media/Install Grub2 to the drive via grub-install.Put the following into boot/grub/grub.cfg:
Code:
set timeout=120
set default=0
[code]....
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May 2, 2010
start getting Linux up and running. Like a lot of people, I chose an older computer I could fuss with, a 500mhz 256meg ram machine, and decided to install Puppy on a spare 40meg hard drive I have, as my bios does not boot from usb...I think...
Anyway, I have found that my bios does not recognize the hard drive when formatted to ext2! I have taken the drive and formatted it back to ntfs, and my bios recognizes it, and then back again to ext2, and nope, it's not there, thus I am still booting puppy from the cd...sigh...
Is my bios so out of date that I'm just out of luck? Is there anyway to check this?
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Oct 26, 2010
I have installed Isadora on 8gb USB drive. getting to like this OS.a lot. Problem is I will soon be running out of space and lack speed. I would like to transfer all my data and downloads to my hard drive permanently. Can I make my memory stick installable?
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Apr 17, 2010
I am trying to install Ubuntu 9.10 on a laptop. The laptop does not have working cd-rom or an operating system installed. I was hoping to install via USB cd-rom. The bios is an old one and will not allow booting from USB. Does anyone know of a way for me to install?
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Mar 17, 2010
i have a peguin computing 130 server running ubuntu server 9.10 and today i open the box to removed one of the hard drives that wasn't being used and the server is no longer booting to the bios.
i have removed the ram and placed it back but notting is showing up. Every time i turn it on it doesn't show anything not even the bios.
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Mar 19, 2010
I just purchased a shiny new LG 10x BD-ROM Combo drive. I installed it without problems. The rest of my system consists of:
MSI k9a2 platinum mobo
AMD Phenom 9950
3x SATA HDD
nvidia gtx260
That's probably everything pertinent. I have the SATA HDDs installed on SATA ports 1, 3, 4 (not the promise slots, 5 & 6), and the BD-ROM installed on SATA 2. I don't think that's an issue, though. I did replace a working sony opiartic (sp?) DVD-RW, so I don't suspect any cable issues (for that and for other reasons).
note: "restart" = "reboot via restart", as opposed to power down & turn back on.
1. I turn on the power. BIOS posts that it sees the BD-ROM in the SATA 2 spot.
2. I boot into Ubuntu 9.10 (updated with the latest x.20 kernel). It does take a little longer than usual to load between the grub menu and the login.
3. After login, the device shows up as cdrom0 in the "Places" menu. Clicking on it returns an error whether a disc is in the drive or not. At this point, however, the open/close button on the drive no longer works. Its as if it's lost all power or connection or something.
4. When I restart, BIOS hangs a while while posting. It shows only devices on SATA ports 1, 3, & 4. It's as if the BD-ROM doesn't exist anymore.
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lspci and lspci -vvnn show nothing... well, technically they show everything BUT the drive. I'm planning on purchasing a second BD-ROM (different manufacturer, if I can help it), to test later, but I don't have high hopes. It could be a motherboard issue, I suppose, but updating the BIOS from 1.4 to the latest version (1.9) solved nothing. I don't suspect it's the hardware, though, since it works fine in Win7. I imagine that the culprit is linux/ubuntu, and I need some help figuring out if this is a fixable problem. I've been really, really happy with Ubuntu and linux in general. Ubuntu is my primary OS, with Win7 as my backup in case of emergencies, but I'm seriously considering wiping linux & using Win7 exclusively altogether with this severe hardware issue.
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