vindoze

Thanks for the tip. Will go there next (to given link).Have made quite a bit of progress since. It appears I have a USB hub. However from this hub and even from an extension hub attached to this hub have been able to load PLoP Linux from a USB stick using 'kexec-loader'! SPB-Linux boot floppy had been able to pass me over to their Linux System on USB long before, however I had ended up in an endless Midnight Commander loop, and I had never been a fan of Norton Commander., but PLoP is more flexible, all credit to them:) Reached a half-way solution now after many attempts at different combinations. Consists of a two-boot process. First of all boot PLoP from USB and then change root to the Kanotix distribution. It's not ideal, but at least it frees 32Mb of my 64Mb RAM, which was before occupied by the Live CD's RAM disk, and I can even get X up! So now have Kanotix on first partition of USB stick, then swap partition and finally on last 64Mb partition PLoP Linux. The ideal solution of course is to make a kernel with the requisite USB and SCSI support modules. Advice for which I shall seek on the recommended boards. vindoze

Hi Over the last couple of weeks I have been trawling the net, the jumping-off point being this very helpful discussion. Hard disk on the blink, old motherboard, old BIOS, from last millenium ... Have been temporising with the Kanotix(flavour of Knoppix) Live CD. Managed to set up the distribution on a 4Gb USB Stick. Absolutely no BIOS support, so the PLoP USB boot floppy did not help at all, and could not boot PLoP Linux from a USB stick. Finally came to 'kexec-loader' boot floppy, which seems to be just the ticket! Downloaded from http://www.solemnwarning.net/kexec-loader/ This working with me. yeah finally I boot USB But the boot process is not complete I have Live Linux in my USB stick. When I boot from it 1. vmlinuz -------------------- OK 2. initrd.gz ------------------- don't complete the loading and it [►restart◄] !! So, what may the case of this problem? -- Xtreme Booting Kanotix from USB stick reached:- VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) {I believe is end of kernel} ... initrd-tools: 0.1.77 {within initrd?} mount: unknown filesystemtype 'devfs' usbcore: registered new driver usbfs usbcore: registered new driver hub USB Mass Storag support registered FATAL: Module sd_mod not found ... Kernel panic ... I presume 'devfs' is also on a module which could not be downloaded from USB, because USB support had not yet been enabled, and likewise module 'sd_mod' could not be downloaded from USB because 'sd_mod' was required for USB support. Well, kexec-loader has some sort of facility for loading modules which the target kernel might need, and which I shall further explore. Would appreciate help in finding out which module is required for 'devfs'. P.S. Shall now try my luck with PLoP Linux