[syslinux] SYSLINUX and USB keys

[Quinn]

When I did my testing in October it was on a IBM ThinkCentre machine.  
The BIOS had an option to boot USB hard drives as well
as USB removeables - no mention of USB-ZIP.  No problems booting 
grub/syslinux from the hard drive formatted USB key.  Memdisk
is still an issue though with MS/PC-DOS memdisk images when the USB-KEY 
is the BIOS (0x80) primary hard drive (I only had an IBM ThinkCentre to 
test it on).

When x86 emulators start supporting USB and booting from USB devices 
then I can test again (I don't have access to a physical machine anymore 
that can boot from USB devices).

Does anybody know if VMWare supports booting from USB keys?

Quinn


H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> Some people here have reported problems with USB keys.  I have found 
> one problem which doesn't boot USB keys formatted as hard disks, and 
> wanted to relate what I've found.
>
> First of all, this is a BIOS bug.  It's an Award BIOS; I can't get it 
> to show any other version information.
>
> Second, even though the "system configuration" screen shows the USB 
> key as a "hard drive", it WILL NOT try to boot it if the boot screen 
> is set to USB-HDD.
>
> It will try to boot it if set to USB-ZIP or USB-FDD, but both of those 
> will crash due to geometry mismatch.  I have verified that there is no 
> way to query the geometry from the BIOS (just as there isn't for real 
> floppy drives.)  The only way to get that to recognize is presumably 
> to format the entire key (no partition table) with the correct 
> geometry expected by the BIOS (which I don't know what it is).
>
> I suspect that these aren't the problems that some of you might have 
> seen.  Unfortunately, that means I don't have any way of reproducing 
> them.
>
>     -hpa
>
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