Booting motherboard without USB options

[Lanstrom]

 

Hi,

 

I have bought the Lexar Firefly USB flash but my Soyo Dragon motherboard doesnt seem to have an option to boot from USB.

I have tried all the available options including ZIP and LS120 etc but nothing works.  I tried updating to last known bios but it seems that USB was never added to the available boot options.

 

I have found a web site http://www.computing.net/dos/wwwboard/forum/13288.html that lets you create a DOS boot disk and which will then load a USB drive so I can see the USB flash listed but I haven't got a clue if its then possible to then boot off it ?  Has anyone else used this idea ?  I realise it would mean having to leave a floppy disk in the drive but that wouldnt matter.

 

The USB flash is working fine in my other PC but I would rather not use that as an unRAID server.

 

Thanks.

 

[RobJ]

Try a search for 'kicker' in the unRAID forums.  I don't have personal experience.

 

[Joe L.]

Here is one thread where a floppy was used as you described:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=244.msg1682#msg1682

 

Good Luck.  Biggest issue for me was the amount of available RAM on the older machines I own.  None of them could handle 512Meg of ram.

 

Joe L.

[Lanstrom]

 

Thanks for your help but unfortunately it still doesn't work.

 

I created the kicker disk with the panasonic driver and it detects the USB key and then says ASPIDISK.SYS sucessful and that there is 1 SCSI drive handled by it.  Then it continues and comes up with the error 'LINLD v0.97 Can't open kernel file'

 

I have tried formatting the USB key using the HP formatter and also tried using 'syslinux -sam h:'

 

Any other ideas please ?  Hair is almost gone !

 

Thanks

 

[Lanstrom]

 

Could I try evaluating unRAID off an old Hard Disk (IDE) for 3 drives and then upgrade my mobo/proc/mem at a later stage when I want to add more drives ?

 

I just dont seem to be getting anywhere with this kicker disk despite it saying that the ASPI driver has loaded successfully.

 

 

 

[RobJ]

I believe there are 3 different kicker floppies, a different one works for different hardware.  There's a 'kicker.rar' on the Web that contains all 3, I think.  You tried the Panasonic, did the other 2 not work?

 

Here's a NasLite-oriented source, you would need to edit the autoexec.bat:  http://homepage.ntlworld.com/lou.greyfaulk/.  The newkickers.zip here seems to be the same as kicker.rar.

 

NasLite and FreeNAS are older NAS systems, designed when pre-USB systems were still plentiful, and have better support in their forums for kicker disks.  unRAID is a newer effort, and USB support and USB boot support are very common, so perhaps that is why kicker disks have been a rare topic here, but I believe there are several users who have succeeded with them.

 

[Lanstrom]

 

That was actually the site I grabbed the kicker files off but thanks anyway.

 

All 3 of the kicker disks come up with the same error saying 'Can't Open Kernel File'.

 

I am now going to try and boot unRAID using an old IDE hard disk.  Is there any known problems with doing this with the free version (up to 3 drives) ?

 

Once I have filled the drives I will look at buying a new setup to run unRAID off a USB key.

 

[RobJ]

That "error saying 'Can't Open Kernel File'" is the same error as this thread:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=897.

 

You probably know more about Linux than I do, and have tried the usual things, but I'm curious what autoexec.bat linld lines you tried.  If it were me, I would try the simplest "linld image=c:bzimage initrd=c:bzroot", all lowercase.  Others I would try are:

  linld image=bzimage initrd=bzroot

  linld image=c:bzimage initrd=c:bzroot "cl=root=/dev/ram0 rw"

  linld image=c:bzimage initrd=c:bzroot [email protected]

 

Tom also adds a rootdelay=10 in there, I don't know how significant that is.

 

On the flash, the files become marked System and Hidden, which may be why one user thought the drive looked empty.  Not sure if that matters either.  Hopefully there's an idea here or in the linked thread that might help.

 

[Lanstrom]

 

Thanks RobJ

 

The only line I have added to the autoexec.bat is - LINLD image=c:BZIMAGE initrd=c:BZROOT "cl=root=/dev/sda1"

 

I have a hard disk in attached to the PC.  Would this make a difference ?  What I mean is that if the bios allocated this HD as drive C and then the kicker disk did the same would that be causing confusion or does it not work that way ?