[ltp] Booting from USB stick

Haines Brown linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:13:58 -0500


This is my first experience with a laptop of any kind, and so my
question is undoubtedly naive. 

I created a USB-key with a live sidux system on it. I can boot sidux
on the machine on which I made the key. My aim now is to boot a
Thinkpad X61s with it and install sidux in place of the Windows sytem
the laptop came with.

However, when I try to boot the USB stick, it is bypassed and the hard
disk is booted. My guess is that either BIOS is not set up right or
the grub menu on the stick is mis-configured. I have a debian lenny on
a usb-stick that I believe should be bootable, but it does not boot on
the Thinkpad either. 

In the Thinkpad X61s BIOS, I have BIOS support enabled. According to
the accompanying notes, this should enable booting a USB
device. However, I don't see any provision in the Thinkpad for setting
boot device priority. 

As for the grub menu, here's what I have:

  default 0
  timeout 10
  color red/black light-red/black
  foreground EE0000
  background 400000
  gfxmenu /boot/message

  ##ISO boot
  title sidux (fromISO + fromUSB) 
  kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23.12-slh-smp-2 boot=fll \ 
  	 fromhd=UUID=b4f48c83-75df-4a04-b28a-bbcccc24113f \ 
         fromiso nointro quiet vga=791 lang=us/fromiso
  initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img-2.6.23.12-slh-smp-2

The files and locations pointed to here do exist on the USB stick. I
have a half-gig ISO file in / and a /boot directory that holds the
initrd, kernel, and a /grub directory. The USB-stick has an ext3
filesystem. 

I don't understand why the:
"fromhd=UUID=b4f48c83-75df-4a04-b28a-bbcccc24113f". I'm booting from
usb, not from hd. Do I have to remove this statement? And is the
device ID here not that of the machine on which the key was made
rather than the Thinkpad? Also, is it likely I need to disable apic?

Haines Brown