Booting from an USB stick with an old BIOS using a boot CD

Question

Hi
I use larch to build a customized live-usb system, and I'm pretty happy with it.
The problem is that I can't boot it on some old computers, with a BIOS that :
Doesn't support booting from USB devices
Doesn't support accessing USB devices
This mean, that, when using a CD with GRUB, the USB stick cannot be seen by GRUB.
That issue is discussed in the Ubuntu help : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromUSB
As you can see, I have problem #2, so my option is to use Linux USB drivers to boot from the stick.
kernel /boot/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true persistent
The only problem is that, this seems to be Ubuntu-specific, and I don't know how to do that in Arch Linux : do I need a custom kernel or something ?
I tried searching for "cdrom-detect" in the Linux Kernel Documentation, without success.
Thanks
Last edited by mickael9 (2010-09-29 20:08:53)

Answer 1

I use Plop bootmanager to boot from usb cause my PC cant boot from usb because of BIOS
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
I actually use a older version that seems to work better than newer one
link to mine> http://multidistro.com/downloads/plpbt
grub legacy entry
title Plop
root (hdx,x)
kernel /boot/plpbt
grub2
menuentry "Plop" {
       set root='(hd0,1)'
       search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e6adb195-3201-42f0-b6d6-f175abe1912c
       linux16 /boot/plpbt
see if that works