On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Caroline Meeks
<[email protected]> wrote:
> trying to tease out what all the different failure mechanisms are

One failure mode I know of:  Most USB sticks come pre-formatted from
factory in a funny "FAT-16 LBA" partition mode and fs format. If you
remove the partition and recreated it, most tools (and users!) will
default to FAT-32 for new FAT partitions.

And oftentimes BIOSes can't handle booting from FAT-32. I've spotted
this on my (earlyish) EEE 701 and I think OFW also has (had?) this
limitation.

So if you have a non-booting disk, it's worthwhile asking fdisk about
the partition mode, and check what the file utility says about the
contents of the block device (in the partition).

cheers,



martin
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