[SOLVED] VE30.0 hybrid ISO on USB stick won't boot on Dell 2950

[ejb11235]

I have been trying to install VE3.0 onto a Dell 2950 using a USB stick and following the "Install from USB Stick" instructions

I have used both ImageWriter on windows and dd on linux. Both of these approaches resulted in a USB stick that will boot on my Dell laptop, but neither will boot on the Dell 2950.

With ImageWriter, it just says "no bootable device found"

With the dd technique, it says something like (can't remember the exact message) "bad or missing syslinux"

From my reading about hybrid ISO's, it appears that there are problems with the partition table. And in fact, when I try to use diskpart on the usb stick, I get an error message saying "recursive partition table".

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

--eric

 

[ejb11235]

I say "solved", because I was finally able to boot from the USB stick, although gparted still complains about "recursive partition table". So I have no idea what I did to fix the problem, except a lot of reformatting partitions and devices. The only thing I can think of is that I had created a 1GB partition on the USB stick prior to copying the ISO to the device using dd. At this point I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

 

[mir]

You did remember that this part 'of=/dev/XYZ' refers to the disk and not a partition?

So if the disk is /dev/sda the it should read 'of=/dev/sda'

 

[ejb11235]

I did, but I only discovered that nuance after I searched around the net for "hybrid iso doesn't boot" or something like that and picked up that detail in a completely different forum. It would probably be good to amend the wiki to include that detail.

I think what fixed the problem was creating a partition and then doing dd. Because I was finally able to boot after that, and up until then I had just been initializing the entire device.

 

[mir]

It could be the case where dd'ing the iso did not properly configure a bootable partition. The partition in which /boot is found needs to have the boot flag on. The partition can have the boot flag configured also after its creation without destroying the partitions data. See man fdisk, look for boot flag.

 

[ejb11235]

Interesting. Perhaps one of various machinations caused the boot flag to get set when it hadn't been before. I'll have to keep an eye out for that if I encounter this again.

Thanks