How to boot Debian 10 from usb stick without BIOS support?

[khelben1979]

I have a HP laptop over here which I bought 4 years ago, I cannot boot Debian 10 live usb stick using my BIOS settings. From the Grub command menu by pressing the c key, what do I type from there in order to be able to boot from the usb stick?

[arochester]

Why can't you change the BIOS to boot from the USB stick first - before the Hard Drive?

Can't you use Boot Order? Normally on an HP, after you install the USB stick, press f10 when you see the HP logo.

[khelben1979]

My BIOS does not support booting from usb sticks, only usb cd / dvd-roms or usb harddisk. It even supports usb floppy drive. I already changed the boot order for it to access all the alternatives before the GRUB menu, and I also checked if the usb stick has a valid boot flag, and it does.

[v&n]

Did you try any of the grub chainloading tricks? https://superuser.com/a/811142

[Deb-fan]

PLop ... a piece of software which does (or at least used to do what you're asking about.)

Just to be overly helpful/anal. Found the link to the thing, yeppers, looks like it's still being actively developed. Didn't read the site enough to know if it's still free though.

[p.H]

IIRC on HP PC's F10 opens the setup. F9 opens the boot menu.

Any HP PC I have used since the Pentium 4 generation was able to boot from USB. But ok, let's assume you are right.
Some UEFI/BIOS firmwares expose all USB storage devices regardless of the active boot device. Some expose only a USB device when it is the active boot device. Usually, they expose only devices which they are able to boot from. You can check exposed devices with "ls" at the GRUB command line. If your firmware falls into the first category, you can try to chainload the bootloader on the USB stick from GRUB using the "chainloader" command. The argument depends on whether the system boots in BIOS or EFI mode.

Does the laptop and GRUB boot in EFI or BIOS/legacy mode ?

If the firmware does not expose the USB stick, you may try to load GRUB's native drivers for USB with the command "nativedisk". Make sure you load all required modules before. Use at your own risks. Alternatively, you can copy the boot files (vmlinuz, initrd, grub.cfg) from the USB stick to the internal drive, and boot them from GRUB.

[andre@home]

This may also help:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/235393/ ... xtremely-s

Subject: Boot from Live CD, then install from USB stick? (because CDROM drive extremely slow/faulty)

I ended up copying the content of the USB stick to a local hard drive using dd:

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/sdd of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct

Where sdd is the USB stick and sdb the local hard drive. Then I removed the CD, rebooted, and installation went fine.

This works only if you have two local hard drives (one as the install media, one as the target system). I guess you could do the same with fdisk and partitions, but somehow when I tried it did not work.

Even though this solution worked, I accept jeroen's solution as it works even when you don't have two local hard drives

[khelben1979]

I put some images together here which shows my boot BIOS settings and also the devices listed from the GRUB menu using the ls command: https://photos.app.goo.gl/1Y8XEWjf2NuqiBD16

[arochester]

Doesn't USB Diskette on key mean the same thing as a USB stick?

Also known as a thumb drive, pen drive, gig stick, flash stick, jump drive, disk key, disk on key (after the original M-Systems DiskOnKey drive from 2000),[1] flash-drive, memory stick (not to be confused with the Sony Memory Stick), USB key, USB stick or USB memory. For an incomplete list of alternative names, see the list of redirects to this article.

Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash ... cite_ref-2

CD-Rom Boot is also enabled...

[p.H]

lt shows three drives : hd0, hd1, hd2. I guess hd1 with all the GPT partitions is the boot+system drive, which means UEFI boot (confirm with "set"). With BIOS/legacy boot, the boot drive would be hd0. Now you have to find out what are hd0 and hd2 and whether one is the USB stick. ls does not show any partitions on hd0 and hd2, for the possible following reasons :
- they do not contain media (e.g. empty card readers) ;
- they do not contain a partition table ; if they contain a filesystem, you can try to read its contents with "ls (hd0)/" ;
- they contain a DOS/MBR partition table but the driver is not loaded ; load it with "insmod part_msdos" and run "ls" again.

You can also unplug the USB stick, reboot, run "ls" again and compare the outputs.

[khelben1979]

I have to make a short update over here! Earlier today I used the dd command to write the .iso file to the usb memory, and when I booted the computer, it was able to boot from it! All other graphical programs that I previously used for this had failed, and that made me think I could not boot from the usb flash memory. It did turn out that I can! As I clicked [ESC] at startup, I could then click [F9] and it said "no valid operating system" or something like that.

It seems the main issue were that the other programs wanted to use FAT32 instead of FAT16 when they created the start disk, and for some reason, my BIOS didn't like that! They also must have either failed or added a wrong type of boot flag. Using the dd command worked perfectly, but it's a shame there were no GUI which could help me with this task, but it is what it is.

[trinidad]

https://debian.pkgs.org/10/debian-main- ... 4.deb.html

TC

[CwF]

Instead of writing one image to many sticks, is there a utility to write multiple iso's to the same stick with a boot loader choice of iso?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

is there a utility to write multiple iso's to the same stick with a boot loader choice of iso?

It's possible to store the ISO images on a partition on the USB stick and then configure GRUB to boot them:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mu ... _USB_drive

See my website page for an example of a GRUB menuentry stanza for a Debian ISO image.

[p.H]

It's possible to store the ISO images on a partition on the USB stick and then configure GRUB to boot them:

Not all ISO images natively support this. AFAIK, Debian installation images don't.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Debian installation images don't

The live sessions work but I haven't tried booting the installer kernel & initrd.