Has anyone had any luck booting from USB CDROM device?

[JustGreg]

I think about getting a Devon IT "thin client" machine for some expermenting. It does not have a cdrom. I have tried to boot from a USB CDROM device before with no luck. I have figured how to do USB Hard Drives and Flash Devices and can do it regularly. I would like to know if anyone has any luck booting from a USB CDROM, especially with the Devon IT "thin client" with 433 VIA motherboard/128 Megabyte Flash Card/128 Megabyte Memory. It would be nice to know if someone has managed to boot with a USB CDROM before dropping the money into the experiment. Thank you in advance for any help on this one.

[ChechenPuppy]

I have problem with booting from external usb cdrom.
Just posted a question about it.

[norsiwel]

I have successfully booted 1.07, using a wakepup floppy boot disk, that then recognized the usb cd drive and booted the puppy cd from there, none of my current machines has the option to boot directly from usb.

[BlackAdder]

JustGreg,
With those machines like the Devon NTAVO that have a CF card attached to the IDE channel, the best way to get started is to copy the Puppy files from the CD-ROM to the CF card. Then make the CF card bootable (e.g. with syslinux). Then plug the CF card into the adapter and watch it boot.
Obviously you would need a CF card adapter/reader to plug into another machine to get you started, but no need for a CD-ROM.
Process is a little different for Puppy2, but not that much.

[dvw86]

I have a Mini-ITX ML8000, very similar to the Devon product. In order to boot from a USB CDROM you have to copy usr_cram.fs from the CD to somewhere that Puppy can find it. See the How Puppy Works page and scroll down to "Take 1". If you have a hard drive you can copy usr_cram.fs to that. Since the Devon product doesn't have a hard drive, the best bet is to put it on a Compact Flash card plugged into the IDE bus. But then you may as well boot from that instead of the USB CDROM like BlackAdder mentioned.

[JustGreg]

Thank you Black Adder and dvw86 for the information. It looks like the best way is to use the compact flash in an IDE adapter. I tried with no luck to find a way to use a USB CDROM to boot a system. If I have any luck then I will post the process. Thanks again!

[pythoncoder]

I use a 1GB CF card in an IDE adaptor and it works very nicely on hardware that has no optical drive or floppy drive.

I formatted it (on another machine) as a bootable DOS disk using FreeDOS, temporarily installed it in the target machine then checked that it booted to DOS. The disk now contains command.com and kernel.sys

Using the PC with an optical drive I copied usr_cram.fs, vmlinuz and image.gz to the disk, and the tiny.exe Gujin bootloader available from http://gujin.sourceforge.net/. I created an autoexec.bat file with the following contents

c:\tiny.exe c:\vmlinuz c:\image.gz root=/dev/ram0 PFILE=pup1-none-524288 PHOME=hda1 PSLEEP=999

(all on one line). I then installed it on the target machine and booted Puppy.

The parameters cause Puppy to use a 512MB file pup1 for its filesystem, and to load itself into ramdisk thus avoiding unnecessary writes to the flash memory.

Pete