Booting from a cheap USB drive...

[Faizan Kazi]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Woody Shea <woody at izar-shea.com> wrote:

> First, thank you for the reply.

sure dude, youre welcome! I know the feeling... its great when other people
help me, so i'm just trying to return the favor to the general community.

>
> I don't think GParted reads the disk right. It reports that the disk
> is 251MiB and, when I try to format, it core-dumps.
>

Seeing that GParted doesn't fare well, there's obviously something bigger
going on here... Cuz Gparted usually doesn't give troubles.
you might want to try Hiren's Boot Cd (9.8) to partition ur drive. It has a
bunch of cool tools in it, so its good to keep it handy:
http://www.kaldata.net/modules.php?modid=1&action=show&id=579
http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=hiren

Now, being an Electrical Engineer, here's what i think is going on:
its possible your drive doesnt support sectors smaller than 2048 cuz it
doesnt have enough memory addressing space... basically since you want to
increase the number of sectors to 4 times what it'd be with 2048, it cant
provide each sector with a unique address to store and retrieve data. it
basically has to do with the memory controller.... :(

if you dont understand what i mean, then think of a 9 digit phone number. if
the telephone company (or memory controller) supports only 9 digit phone
numbers, then there is no room for expansion in case more than 10 to the
power 9 phone numbers are ever required, cuz each number maps to a unique
phone line to a unique house (unique memory sector).

so you cant do anything abt it if thats the case :( cuz the issue is with
hardware support.

but try it with hiren's boot cd anyways, and if Acronis Disk Director or the
other partition manager (forgot its name, but its next to it in the menu..
"partition manager/editor" maybe??) works then great!! format to Fat32 of
course.. or maybe Ubuntu's USB creator uses Fat16 :s

>
> I'm fairly certain that I can't format to 512, so... Can I boot Linux on
> it?
>
> If you cant set the sector size to 512 then i dont think you will be able
to use your flash drive.. im really sorry. :( there might be hope yet, im no
expert!
btw 4 gig flash drives are getting pretty reasonable these days.. i bought a
16gb flash drive (Kingston Data Traveler... very reputable), including
shipping for 25 US dollars off Woot.com half a year back! :)

Try newegg.com or tigerdirect.com or compusa.com or frys if you're in the
USA

Regards
Fez
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20090530/414d4a5f/attachment.html>