When no CD in drive bios tries to boot from NIC??

I have homed in on my issue re: "invalid partition" problems upon boot. The situation is:
When Bios (K8N Neo2 Plat bios v 1.1) set to boot from Floppy, then CD, then HDD, AND WITH a CD in the drive, I get a good boot into XP Pro SP1.
If no CD in drive, or if bios set to boot sequence floppy, HDD, CD...I get no boot and a message that I have found all over the net but with no real resolution:
"For Realtek RTL81108/8169(S or 5...can't read my own writing) Gigabit Eathernet Controller beta v1.00 (030811)
Client MAC ADDR (whole lot of numbers) GUID FFFF....FFFF (whole lot of Fs)
PXE-E53: no boot file name recived
PXE-M0F: Exsiting PXE-ROM
Invalid Partition Table"
Now...what the heck is going on? I have read that this would seem to indicate the bios trying to boot from a network, but none of my bios settings indicate that. I've tried disabling Gigabit Ethernet in bios as well since I'm a home user and 10/100 is plenty, but no impact.
For now, I can just keep a CD in the drive but this is rediculous. ANy suggestions? Is this an issue with MSI bios 1.1 or Realtek Ethernet driver (I supposedly have the most recent verison, dated Aug 04)...???
Thanks in advance for nay inputs,
Chris
A64 3500+
MSI K8N Neo 2 PLatinum
Zalman 400B PSU
Asus 16x DVD ROM
Plextor 712-A DVR / CDRW
2 GB (4 x 512) Corsair XMS 3200 C2PT
MSI 9800 Pro 128 (recognized as XT)
Audigy 2 ZS
Sony Floppy
Win XP Pro Sp1

Similar error here..
I am booting up my system for the first time. It boots up past the Platinum screen, But then it gives me the following errors:
For Realtek RTL8110S/8169S Gigabit Ethernet Controller beta v 1.00 (030811)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM
His fix was..
lol... I'll go ahead and tell you. I was getting all those weird errors.... saying files were corrupt and such. I noticed that in the bios it was reading my CD-RW drive as Slave and wasn't recognizing my DVD drive at all. So... I put the jumper for the DVD Drive on Master.... popped in the Windows XP CD and everything worked fine.
It's a long shot, but looks like he had a jumper wrong, and it fooled the BIOS into booting from a network.
Sounds to me like something is fooling yours.
You can get that error with RIS, but XP doesn't have RIS as such.
GUID FFFF....FFFF (whole lot of Fs) is the GUID of your firewire.
Like a NIC has a MAC address, a firewire port has a GUID. (lots of digits, more than a MAC)

Similar Messages

External Hard Drive Not recognized when trying to boot from it.

So I am trying to boot from my external hard drive through firewire but my computer doesn't seem to recognize the external. There is some problem with my Macbook not booting up correctly and I want to backup my data before reinstalling Tiger. They did this at the Apple store and ran disk utility on it my Macbooks hard drive. I could access all my data, but now when I get home and plug in my hard drive, hold down option after booting, the only drive that pops up is the Mac HD. I read somewhere to try partitioning the external drive as Mac Journaled and I did so with my working Macbook Pro. Any ideas whats going on?

Well i got most of my information off the old one, now I am trying to reinstall Tiger to the MacBook. Problem is I initially tried to do an archive install and the install kept failing after the second disc when it asked for the second install disc.
The people at the Apple store suggested that I try to do a wipe of the hard drive and install. Now when I put in the Disc 1 install disc and boot from the cd drive it just sits for a while and then ejects disc 1 and goes back to the place where the install failed from before ie: it keeps asking for the second install disc.
I can't figure out a way to get around this and just do a clean install on the machine. Any thoughts would be great.

I have a MacBook pro late 2011 version it's not booting up so I am trying to boot from a USB recovery drive but when I select it nothing happens it jus goes to the restore options

I have a MacBook pro late 2011 version it's not booting up so I am trying to boot from a USB recovery drive but when I select it nothing happens it jus goes to the restore options

Bahamaguy wrote:
I have a MacBook pro late 2011 version it's not booting up ....
So what you want is to be able to boot from OS X and retrieve your files
Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Of course if it's not booting up, it's easier to fix in place
..Step by Step to fix your Mac
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents#/
...so I am trying to boot from a USB recovery drive but when I select it nothing happens it just goes to the restore options
"Recovery HD" is a partition on your boot drive which you option or commnad r key held at boot time to get into and then repair the Macintish HD partition.
If you have this on a external USB thumb drive, then that's all it is, no OS X, programs or files.
If your talking a USB external drive, it has to be a OS X bootable clone made with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and the option key held at boot time gives you that boot option.
Most commonly used backup methods
So what your saying is you have a external clone and by holding the option key down at boot all you get is it directly going to Recovery HD?
There is no Startup Manager option to choose what to boot from?
This could mean Apple changed something, or your external bootable clone isn't one, or the wrong software used so it's not being recognized by Startup Manager as a bootable option.
What did you use to make the external OS X USB bootable drive?

MSI NF980-G65 freezes when trying to boot from disc

I just recently purchased and received an MSI NF980-G65 motherboard to work with my AMD Phenom II x6 1055T, but sadly I have had nothing but trouble.
So far the motherboard posts its bios and has the ability to detect any (and all) of my hard drives when I have them plugged in. The hard drive that has Windows installed on it currently informs me that I need to put in my Windows disc and run the repair utility, which makes sense since I was using a completely different motherboard and CPU before.
It is when I try to press any key to boot from disc that the problem arises. When I press a key on my keyboard while that prompt is on screen, the cursor jumps as if I had hit the tab key and does nothing further.
I have a total of three copies of Windows 7 at my disposal to use, two are DVDs I had burned from using my student discount to get them, and one set (32-bit and 64-bit) were in a retail copy of home premium, all of the discs performed the same action. I had tried using different SATA cables, different power adapters, and even different DVD players to try and remedy the situation.
The hard drive with windows is an IDE hard drive, but I have tried my other SATA hard drives just to be sure, none of which fixed the problem.
I have heard briefly about m-flash, but as far as I can tell, it would appear this new motherboard did come with the latest bios version (1.4).

For the boot, I have tried both setting up the DVD player as the initial boot, and I have tried just selecting it in the boot menu.
As per the posting guide, here are more specific information:
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 2.8 GHz, 9.0 MB Total Cache, AM3 Socket
Motherboard: MSI NF980-G65 v. 1.2 bios (I'm going to try and flash this to a later now, I didn't know where to look for it before) , 601-7612-010B1004183389
RAM: G. Skill Ripjaw DDR3-1600 PC3-12800 2gb x 1 until I get this working, then it will be x4
Power Supply: Tagan BZ Series 700W
DVD: Samsung SH-S223 DVD burner with Lightscribe
HDD: Western Digital 250GB IDE drive

Mac Pro trying to boot from external drive instead of HD?

my osx was recently reinstalled at the Genius Bar due to a boot problem caused by a power outage. Now if i want to boot up
i have to unplug time machine first; it is possibly trying to boot from the external drive till i unplug it. What should I do?

I would have:
not let you go home without also buying
a 1500VA UPS
a new system drive
other drives as needed
start with a clean install of the OS to a new drive
Clone your system when you do get a good install and update (Apple only)
then clone again when you have all your apps in place
Don't assume anything works, in fact assume nothing will for now.

I am having trouble trying to boot from my lion osx install disk on a 2007 macbook. The disk ejects when I start up with the option key depressed. Anyone have any ideas?

I am having trouble trying to boot from my lion osx install disk on a 2007 macbook. The disk ejects when I start up with the option key depressed. Anyone have any ideas?
Thank you.

How did you get a Lion OSX install disc? They don't exist. Do you mean the gray disks that came with your 2007 MacBook?
If you mean the gray disks, try starting up with the "c" key held down.
What version of OSX is on your MacBook now? Have you tried booting from the Recovery partition?

Replaced hard drive, now can't boot from install disc to restore backup

Yesterday, my hard drive died (disk warrior informed me, that HD had irrecoverable errors, and my iMac would shut down unless it was booted from the Disk Warriorr disc).
Today, I have a new internal HD professionally installed. And when I brought it home, and installed Snow I got an error at the end of the installation "OS could not be installed, restart or choose start up disk" or something to that effect. However, on licking OK I got the snow music, and welcome movie nd eerything seemed to be working fine.
I can log in normally and have get to my desktop, but on trying to boot from the Snow Leopard disk (10.6), I get to the gray screen with the apple logo and hang. I have tried resetting Pram/firmware and also ran the fdisk command (twice).
It seems too much of a concidence that my hard drive and now my disc drive would die all in span of two days? I can hear the disc noise, but as I mentioned I cant get beyond the gray screen on trying to boot from the disc.
Suggestions?
Late Nov '07 intel iMac. And I did update the OS to 10.6.4. Install disc is 10.4.

Return it to the repair station.

Replaced faulty hard drive now can't boot from Snow Leopard.

Hi there,
As it says I replaced my internal WD 250gb drive in my late 2006 2.16ghz imac . I followed the tutorials on the net to the tee yet upon trying to boot from Snow Leopard after firing it back up all I get is the Apple logo and the timer . I've tried holding C to no avail . I've held Alt to select the OSX disc yet it still won't boot to get me to Disc Utility . I've even put the old hard drive back in . When I hold Alt on start up it shows the drive and the disc but will boot from neither when selected . I've tried to get the Snow Leopard disc to eject so I can try my originals but it won't even do that . I'm convinced I haven't damaged anything but I'm at my wits end ! Does anybody have any ideas how to get the Leopard disc out so I can at least try from my originals ? The drive I've installed is compatible it's a 1tb WD . I also triple checked all the connections and they all seam sound . Really appreciate your help lads as I wanted to give the iMac to my daughter when we get a new one .

You will first need to prep the new drive using Disk Utility on the original 10.4 Disc or Retail upgrade 10.6 DVD. It needs to be Partition GUID Partition Table and Format it Mac OS Extented (Journaled) before you can install and run OS X on it.
1. Boot from your SL install DVD or Bootable Clone and open Disk Utility.
2. Highlight the new HD in the list of drives and select the Partition tab.
3. Under Volume Scheme select 1 Partition and click on the Options... button.
4. Select GUID Partition Table in the drop down window and click OK.
5. Set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and click the Apply button.
6. Once thats done, then you can do a clean Install, Restore from TM or a Bootable Clone.

New hard drive but can't boot from disk?

So I dropped in a new Travelstar last night, reseated all the connections, closed everything up, popped in the software disk that came with the powerbook (OS9) and tried to boot from the disk by holding down the "C" when starting up. No dice. The Screen is black, the drive just spins the disk intermittently and I don't hear the hard disk spinning. I'm guessing that means it's not the hard disk that was the problem. The original problem was that it would lock up and when I restarted it would either get stuck on the gray screen or just a black screen and the hard drive wouldn't spin, just the disk drive would spin. This last time it was just the black screen. Any suggestions?

Hi, rickDJ. Have you tried resetting PRAM and NVRAM?
I'm guessing that means it's not the hard disk that was the problem.
It sounds that way, but the clincher would be if you pulled the new drive and tried to start up from the CD without any HD in place, and got the same result. Then you could be sure neither hard drive was at fault.
One possibility is that the hard disk's short connecting cable is loose or has gotten damaged. Others are that the the optical drive's cable is loose or damaged, or the optical drive itself is dirty or damaged. If the problem persists without any HD or HD cable in place, my next (free) step would be to pull the optical drive and open it up, clean the lens with alcohol, put the drive back in place, make sure its cable connector is solidly seated on the logic board, and test again with the bootable OS 9 disc.
If you can't start the computer up from any bootable CD or DVD with or without a HD in place after zapping PRAM and manually cleaning the optical drive, there's not much more troubleshooting you can do. There are other possible causes of the problem, but they're not pretty $-wise, and you can't identify them by yourself under the circumstances.

I have a 2012 Mini with a fusion drive that won't boot from a usb cloned drive. It came with 10.8.2 pre installed. I have zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC. Any thoughts?

I have a 2012 Mini with a fusion drive that won't boot from a usb cloned drive. It came with 10.8.2 pre installed. I have zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC. Any thoughts?

When I tried using a recently downloaded (from the App store) version of MtLion 10.8.2 (12C60) I could NOT get the new MacMini to install or boot from a USB I had previously made. I was however able to use the Recovery Mode of the MacMini to create a bootable SSD which I had installed. The problem arose when I went back into Recovery DU as it saw the seperate drives (SSD & HD) as a broken Fusion Drive. Interestingly DU from the boot volume had NO issues and reported NO faults. It was the Recovery DU that identified the faulty Fusion Drive configuration. At this point I am definately out of my depth but my speculation is that the Recovery Volume is being used in some fashion to form the method or pattern that DU assigns files to the drives, System Report sees the drives as seperate volumes with all their individual characteristics.
Disk Utility did not make a bootable USB, I don't have or use CCC or Super Duper.
Here is the longer version I've been compiling:
Having bought a late 2012 Mac Mini(6,2) i7 2.66GHZ with the standard 1TB 5400 HD and 4GB of RAM (base model) I immediately decided to install a Mercury Elite 6g 240GB SSD and up the RAM to 16GB. I received both shipments on the same day and had all my new toys in front of me. After following the video advice on OWC’s website for the installation of the second drive I started the mini and formatted the SSD to accept the OS from Recovery on the original HD. This MacMini shipped with 10.8.2 (12C2034) as the OS, the normal build of 10.8.2 is (12C60). Having used Recovery Disk Utility to format the SSD it came back with an error that DU could’t Repair. I went ahead and installed the OS on the SSD and the Mini booted normally from both drives. The issue I encountered with this setup was that iMovie encountered an “unexpected error” and would not save a completed project. I therefore decided to figure the drive issue out because I suspect the new Fusion File Management software didn’t like my configuration with drives that Recovery DU saw as needing to be “fixed”. After spending some time on the phone with both OWC and Apple Support I took the plunge and used Internet Recovery Disk Utility and allowed both drives to be “fixed” after which DU created a Fusion Drive (Logical Drive) that I then ran Repair Disk on and it showed up as a single drive in DU. It works perfectly as described by Apple’s site:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446
Having checked the Link Speed and Negotiated Speed they both show as 6g so I’m pleased not to have lost performance due to it being fuzed to a 3g 5400 drive. The biggest drawback is that Apple’s Fusion Management only allows for 1 additional partition and I would have preferred more than that.
I have sourced some additional information here:
http://blog.macsales.com/15619-special-note-for-adding-an-ssd-to-a-2012-mac-mini ?
http://blog.macsales.com/15619-special-note-for-adding-an-ssd-to-a-2012-mac-mini ?
http://blog.macsales.com/15619-special-note-for-adding-an-ssd-to-a-2012-mac-mini ?
http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/05/undocumented-corestorage-commands/
If anyone has a factory Fusion Drive could you please post the Link and Negotiated Speeds of both drives? This information can be found in Apple > About This Mac > More Info… > System Report > Serial ATA and the drives should show up as discrete drives with their info listed separately.

Hard drive failure - how to boot from replacement?

the hard drive in my Mac Mini has become unbootable - I've gone through all the options suggested in Apple support docs including trying to boot from install disk. I don't get a startup screen to select where to boot from, jus the gray spinning gear. I fear the drive is dead. It was preceeded by strange behavior of permissions. Most of what I read is advice on installing a replacement drive but copying info from the old. How does one create a new bootable drive? I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive with SSD. Thanks Rich

AHT (apple-hardware-test), at least on 10.9-era macs, seems to do *no* tests at all of the hard-driver or SSD. You have to use other testing methods, to run SMART long and short self-tests of SSD and HD as detailed below, and google is your friend.
=== Details ===
For AHT: Power-off. Hold-down "option" and "d" keys, and keep holding them down while you power on. After a minute or two it will boot Apple Hardware Test from internet, at least for 10.9-era hardware. Use a network cable if you can. With known-bad or missing hard-drives, the AHT still says "no problems found".
For example, I have had 3 new macs in 3 weeks that all have hard-drives that always report "read-failure" to SMART tests. The Apple Hardware Test apparently does NOT do any testing of hard-drive(s) at all. Not only did say "No problems found" with the bad-drive(s), if you remove the hard-drive completely it still reports "No problems found"! You may want to run some long SMART tests on hard-drive(s) weekly, even if they are brand new... the 3 that failed on me were different brands from different stores: all reported "read-failure" in around 30 hours. So I conclude that consumer-drives have very poor quality... in effect, the end-user is doing the QA tests by using the drive as apparently little QA goes on at factory. And/or the shipping folks are really throwing those things around hard.
To run SMART tests on a mac, you can "brew install smartmontools" and "brew install gsmartcontrol". Or if you are not a command-line person, you can get a 14-day trial of Drive-DX disk-health tester (looks like ja smartctl-gui-wrapper) from:
http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx They also have a links to a SMART-SAT driver that lets you run smart tests on almost any newer usb-enclosed HD or SSD. Nice
If mac won't boot at all from disk, you can rescue/recover by booting from usb or live-cd such as gparted-live-cd/usb (which boots most intel macs as it has the guid bootability):
http://www.ehow.com/how_8505863_boot-gparted-cd-mac.html
PartedMagic is really nice and boots every intel mac I've tried it on, but is no longer free. Right on desktop is "Disk Health" (which runs gsmartcontrol). Also has ddrescue, testdisk, photorec, etc. Sees HFS+ just fine.

Computer tries to boot from VirtualBench

My computer always tries to boot from VirtualBench on restart. I get a black screen with the cursor blinking. If I unplug VirtualBench on restart, no problems. How can make VirtualBench non bootable?
Thanks,
Alex
Solved!
Go to Solution.

I ran into a similar problem on my Dell machine. I was able to work around the problem by going into the BIOS options and disabling booting from USB mass storage devices. Machine boots without problem now.

IMac always tries to boot from CD

Hi,
i installed Windows XP using BootCamp and since then the system always tries to boot from a CD. Now I have to hold down COMMAND while starting the computer to choose the harddrive.
How can I make the system boot from the harddrive automatically?
Thanks

Hold down on the option key on restart.
Choose the mac os x volume icon and then click on the straight arrow.
Once booted into Leopard select system preferences from the apple menu.
Choose Startup Disk and set the volume you want to boot to on startup.
The option key allows you to boot to any volume without changing the default setting.
The Startup Disk preference allows you to set the default startup volume.

Trying to boot from an external hard drive - drive not recognized at boot

I am trying to upgrade my Operating system. I am going from Mac OS 10.4.11 to Mac OS 10.6.
Hardware:
Model Name:
MacBook Pro 15"
Model Identifier:
MacBookPro1,1
Processor Name:
Intel Core Duo
Processor Speed:
2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors:
1
Total Number Of Cores:
2
L2 Cache (per processor):
2 MB
Memory:
2 GB
Bus Speed:
667 MHz
To backup my existing environment I bought Seagate Free Agent GoFlex 500GB for PC and Mac. USB 3.0 but backward comaptible to USB 2.0 which is what my laptop is. The system requirements included support for 10.4.11. I attached the drive to my lap top and used disk utility to format to Mac Extended OS (journaled). It recognized the drive immediately.
I used SuperDuper 2.6.4 to copy all files to the external drive. It seemed to copy just fine. It said it made the drive bootable. TO test it, I shutdown the system and started it back up with the option key pressed, but it only gave me my original HD as a choice to boot from. When the system came up, it didn't recognize the external drive. I unplugged the drive and re attached it and it seemed to recognize it, I trued to reboot again and it doesn't recognize the hard drive on reboot. Only when I un attach and reattach it.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

I haven't forgotten, it just takes forever to get to a result when backing up an entire system.
So here's what I did. I agree with this idea:
Limnos wrote:
mac-sales.com I mentioned above is the OWC Ogelthorpe uses.
I suspect StartupDisk is seeing a nicely mounted drive connected in a bootable interface (USB) with all the needed files (palced there by SuperDuper). However, what it doesn't know if that drive isn't really accessible until the computer has properly booted because the chipset doesn't work without full system support. This is not at all unusual in external drives. Many years ago you really has to insist upon having an Oxford chipset in an enclosure to guarantee booting, but for general backup use any chipset was fine.
I had an old Lacie drive I have used for file backups over the years:
Disk:
Name :
LaCie Group SA
Type :
Disk
Disk Identifier :
disk1
Media Name :
WDC WD80 0BB-00JHC0 Media
Media Type :
Generic
Connection Bus :
FireWire
Connection Type :
External
Connection ID :
58629628097197639
Partition Type :
GUID_partition_scheme
Device Tree :
/PCI0@0/PCIB@1E/FRWR@3/node@d04b560c0bf647/sbp-2@c000/@0:0
Writable :
Yes
Ejectable :
Yes
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed :
No
Location :
External
Total Capacity :
74.5 GB (80,026,361,856 Bytes)
S.M.A.R.T. Status :
Not Supported
Disk Number :
1
Partition Number :
0
Name :
Macintosh HD
Type :
Volume
Disk Identifier :
disk1s2
Mount Point :
/Volumes/Macintosh HD 1
File System :
Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus :
FireWire
Partition Type :
Apple_HFS
Device Tree :
/PCI0@0/PCIB@1E/FRWR@3/node@d04b560c0bf647/sbp-2@c000/@0:2
Writable :
Yes
Universal Unique Identifier :
438A4768-6F2C-3A0A-96A3-AEF60B7B8815
Capacity :
44.5 GB (47,768,887,296 Bytes)
Free Space :
4.2 GB (4,464,005,120 Bytes)
Used :
40.3 GB (43,304,882,176 Bytes)
Number of Files :
432,903
Number of Folders :
97,585
Owners Enabled :
No
Can Turn Owners Off :
Yes
Can Be Formatted :
Yes
Bootable :
Yes
Supports Journaling :
Yes
Journaled :
Yes
S.M.A.R.T. Status :
Not Supported
Disk Number :
1
Partition Number :
2
I moved everything from the Lacie to the SEaget - at least is it will be useful for something!
Erased the Lacie, partitioned it to 2 partitions.
Formnatted the partition GUID as suggested. I had named the partition for the backup something cutre like 10.4.11 OS clone.
Used Disk Utility>Restore to backup/clone the environment.
During the backup, it renamed the partition Macintosh HD, which was encouraging. After waiting a very long time for the backup, I was able to try to test booting from it and received many diagnostic errors including permission type errors, some of the files in /etc did not beloing to root. I have a couple of things I am going to try but thought I'd throw it out here since you guys have kept me pointed in the right direction.
Any more ideas as to why the drive won' t boot? Did I not give the partition enough space? Is it the chipset thing?

"Missing Operating System" when trying to boot from USB

I have a macbook air (3,2), and I'm trying to install Arch onto the partition that currently has Ubuntu. I have tried a few different ways to get the Arch core iso onto the usb key drive, but no matter what I do, I am ending up with the message "Missing Operating System" when I boot into it.
I started out using the instructions from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/US … tion_Media for writing it on OSX, using diskutil unMount, then the dd with bs=8192, and of=/dev/disk2
When that didn't work, I tried booting into my ubuntu install, and used just a plain
sudo dd if=archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdb
Still no luck, so then I went to my old standby of unetbootin, which didn't do any better. I just tried yet again with the dd in ubuntu, and I'm still not having any luck.
Here's some of the relevant info I could find:
$ sudo dd if=Downloads/archlinux-2011.08.19-core-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb
772096+0 records in
772096+0 records out
395313152 bytes (395 MB) copied, 1.55667 s, 254 MB/s
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 8065 MB, 8065646080 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 7691 cylinders, total 15753215 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3946b2c9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 0 772095 386048 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
One interesting thing I noticed was that the dd took about 10 minutes in mac osx, and under 2 seconds in linux. That seemed like a pretty big difference between the two systems, but I'm not sure if that's related to the batch size on the write, or to the implementation of dd used in OSX.
Is there something obvious I'm missing? I know the computer is able to boot from this key drive because I was able to boot an Ubuntu livecd from it just a few days ago. Unfortunately, the MBA won't boot from my external cd/dvd drive because it's not the apple brand super-drive, and I don't want to spend the money for a super-drive, so a cd-based install isn't an option.
Really looking forward to playing with Arch, because some of my friends recommended it to me highly. I'm a former gentooer (years ago) who became fed-up with installing *everything* from source. I can't stand ubuntu doing everything for me, and debian always seemed so far behind the curve on everything, so Arch seems like the perfect OS if I can just get into the installer. :)
Thanks so much!
~Maquis

Oh, forgot to mention, I did the dd from ubuntu with both bs=4M and without a bs argument. the version without the bs argument is the one that went really fast.
Neither version would boot, so I don't think that the way I'm writing it is the problem.
I did just notice that if I just do a sudo fdisk -l without specifying the drive, I have 2 entries for my drive:
Disk /dev/sdb: 8065 MB, 8065646080 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 7691 cylinders, total 15753215 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3946b2c9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 0 772095 386048 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
Disk /dev/sdb1: 395 MB, 395313152 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 377 cylinders, total 772096 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3946b2c9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1p1 * 0 772095 386048 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS

When no CD in drive bios tries to boot from NIC??

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for