[syslinux] Dell Latitude E5410 doesn't boot my USB thumbnail

[Xianwen Chen]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Gene Cumm <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
> These systems detect attribute and test certain things before showing you
> the drive as a choice.  My observation is that this helps end users that
> just leave a USB drive plugged in and the boot sequence is set to boot USB
> automatically before internal HDD by their administrator.

Thank you Gene. The laptop has been set to boot in the order of USB,
HDD, CDROM, and NIC.

> 1) partitioning.  I had issues with other OptiPlex/Latitude models in the
> same time frame when I attempted custom geometry.  I'm uncertain on
> alignment (ie 1 MiB alignment rather than cylinder).

Hmm, I googled around and tried the following two methods:
a) Set the 512 MB as a USB-ZIP by 'mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sda 0 64 32'
b) Offset as
    mkdiskimage -F -4 /dev/sdb 1 64 32
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1 seek=446 count=64
    echo -e ',0\n,0\n,0\n,,C,*' | sfdisk /dev/sdb
    mkdosfs /dev/sdb4

Neither method worked; but it could be that I misspecified something
in method b), as it was meant for a USB disk which is larger than 8GB
(http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Bootable_USB_Key) and I simply changed
the parameters in the first line ('255 63' to '64 32')

> 2) filesystem.  I haven't attempted anything but FAT16/FAT32.  You might be
> able to fake it by filling in the "fields" of FAT16 if for example you're
> using ext3.

I was using FAT32; but after reading your email, I thought it would be
a good idea to try FAT16, since the size of the USB thumbnail is
small. Unfortunately, it didn't work out.

Another thing which may worth mentioning is that I'm using version
4.01 under Linux. Would that affect anything?

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