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Posts tagged boot
Boot To USB Without BIOS USB Boot Support
On any new machine I purchase I ensure to thoroughly run all hardware with the various diagnostic applications available on the Ultimate Boot CD. I have the UBCD setup on a USB drive which allows me to ditch the CD wallet. Problem is, even in this day and age, there are still machines I encounter that are not compatible with USB boot. Most of the time I’ll burn an ISO to CD and hook up a spare CD-ROM drive, but recently I was determined to get the computer to boot to USB. No BIOS update was available and I searched every inch of the BIOS menus looking for a USB boot option with no success. So, after some browsing around I found PLoP. PLoP is a Boot Manager that will (among other things) allow a machine to boot to USB even without BIOS support. It’s actually quite an easy solution but does require you to make either a floppy or CD. Since the machines I was working with were previously used in a cluster they had no CD-ROM drives but they did contain a floppy drive. To create a PLoP boot disk using another Ubuntu machine I completed the following:
wget http://download.plop.at/files/bootmngr/plpbt-5.0.10.zip sudo apt-get install unzip unzip plpbt-5.0.1.0.zip cd phpbt-5.0.10/
Insert the floppy to write to into the drive. I’m assuming it’s located at /dev/fd0.
fdformat /dev/fd0 dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
Once you complete this you have created the bootable floppy and can now boot the machine to the floppy which contains the boot manager. You will need to ensure that the installed floppy drive is listed on the boot list. Note that the ISO is also included in the downloaded package if you would rather create a CD.
After you boot into PLoP there is a list of available boot options. USB should be an option in the list and you simply select that as the boot option, press Enter, and your USB bootable drive can now be accessed! Note: Once booted to USB I could *only* use PS/2 keyboard and mouse with the machine.
Create Your Own Syslinux Bootloader Logo
SYSLINUX looks for the logo.16 image when booting. The following are my steps for creating mine:
To get started you will need a bootable USB drive with your OS of choice as long as it has SYSLINUX as the boot loader. You can edit this for a CD too but you will need to create a new image after editing it and then burn your disk. I also used an ubuntu machine with Photoshop (though I’m sure GIMP works just as well for this task) and an internet connection.
Note: I would recommend copying the image from your OS of choice which uses SYSLINUX. The original creators of the image had the image created to the proper dimensions to accommodate the boot menu on the bottom of the screen. I used DSL for this example.
1. I first navigated to the root directory of my bootable USB drive which had all DSL and SYSLINUX files on it. The logo.16 file was in this directory. I would recommend creating a copy to mess around with so you can restore the original if all goes wrong.
2. In order to edit the logo.16 file you need to convert it to a format your editor will read. Type the command:
sudo apt-get install syslinux
3. Navigate to the directory in terminal with the logo.16 copy
4. in terminal type the following command:
lss16toppm <logo.16> logo16.ppm
This will create a logo16.ppm file. You should be able to open this in either Photoshop or GIMP to edit.
5. After editing I saved my file with the following properties: GIF, 16 colors, custom palette, 100% dither. I also saved the file in a new folder so that I would not overwrite the logo.16 later on.
6. Open terminal and enter the following command:
sudo apt-get install netpbm
This installs the proper tools to convert the GIF to a pnm, and then to a .16 file.
7. Navigate to the folder where you saved your GIF in terminal and type the following:
giftopnm <logo.gif> logo.pnm
If all goes well you should have a logo.pnm.
8. Type the following command in terminal:
ppmtolss16 <logo.pnm> logo.16
9. Check to ensure your logo.16 has been created in the current directory by typing the ls command.
10. All editing is now completed. Simply copy the new logo.16 to the directory on your USB drive where the old one was located. Boot up your machine using your USB drive and test it out!
Below is my first completed bootloader image for DSL:
Click above to view full size image