Hang @ "Starting USB support" - Solved

[imported_dino9832]

My older Dell laptop would hang up at this point. Other computers work fine.

The problem was identified by:
Use "boot: bt debug".
Hit Ctrl+d to continue twice.
Type "mkdir /mnt/cdrom"
Type "mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom"

The computers that work would mount the cdrom. My Dell would give a bunch of errors and never mount the cdrom.

The solution for me is to boot off a USB device.

I use the CD to boot with:
"boot: bt nocd"

This boots a laptop that can't boot from USB, to the point where it can load the modules, ect.. from a USB device.

[dermintazm]

how did you create the botable usb...My slax creator? list the steps that you took if you can. Did you use the bt beta .iso or the final bactrack image to boot up the modules?

[imported_dino9832]

Unfortunately, it still will not boot without the CD.
I've run the bootinstall.sh script in the /mnt/sda3/ (sda3 is where my install is).
The syslinux command complains about not being a valid FAT partition.

[ghaze]

Did you format the stick with linux?

From the mkdosfs man page:

BUGS
mkdosfs can not create bootable filesystems. This isn't as easy as you might think at first glance for various reasons and has been discussed a lot already. mkdosfs simply will not support it

This drove me nuts until I figured it out.

[imported_dino9832]

Wow! Thanks. That really is a gotcha.
The other problem is that the syslinux that the script uses is for a FAT partition only.

SYSLINUX is a boot loader for the Linux operating system which operates off an MS-DOS/Windows FAT filesystem.

Kind of a catch 22.

I'm going to explore two options at this point.
1) Lilo.
2) EXTLINUX

EXTLINUX is a new syslinux derivative, which boots from a Linux
ext2/ext3 filesystem.

Looking at the make_disk.sh script from BT1.0, it may be possible to just run this script. I may get a chance to play with it some today. And of course I will post my results.

[totoymola]

I use the CD to boot with:
"boot: bt nocd"

This boots a laptop that can't boot from USB, to the point where it can load the modules, ect.. from a USB device.

Hi.

So after booting from the CD with the "nocd" code, what happens next? How do you make it boot from the USB? Is the USB drive detected automatically and continues to load from there? Or do you have to type additional commands?

[imported_dino9832]

Is the USB drive detected automatically and continues to load from there?

Yes. It's pretty cool the way it works.

The CD boots enough software to mount any USB drive devices.
It then scans all hard drive partitions and USB drives for modules to load.
Next, it looks for "slaxconfig.mo" on the media that it found the modules on in order to load any saved configurations.

At least that's the way I understand it.

[jesseboy]

I have an old P3 dell latitude that wouldn't read the cdrom so I setup a tftpd32 can't post the link server which has a built in DHCP server on my XP machine and allowed my laptop to network boot off the XP machine over TFTP while making sure I had inserted a USB thumb drive with the BT directory on the root.

This got me to the login and I could use BT 2.0 from here.

the main links you need to network boot bt 2.0 are:

can't post the link

You're basically setting up a tftp32 server and pushing the bt2 cd down while your USB stick holds the modules

Now I've gotta figure out howto install this to my hard disk. the install script doesn't seem to be working.