-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 04:04:46PM +0200, Martin Langhoff wrote: >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).
Not sure if it has been discussed already, but are you aware of the commandline tool makebootfat? http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/boot-readme.html If nothing else, its manpage has valuable hints about various limitations, quirks and hacks. - Jonas - -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknnQ3AACgkQn7DbMsAkQLigMQCfe6heYu84ep1cYwirL8OZNkEP s7kAnRiCwSnUCUtgQIcd9hwdlyz6r3SF =bnx5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
