I tried the latest snapshot, finnix-dev1947, and found that for some reason it's no longer finding the USB media at all -- even with the bootusb parameter specified. In fact, I even tried both with and without the bootscsi option also specified (I don't know if that was fixed yet but it used to be required at least.) When it drops to the debug console after failing to find a media it acts as if there are no devices assigned to any /dev/sdX that I could find, so I couldn't manually mount either. My assumption here would be some key module is missing or perhaps broken. Oh, and this problem has occured on multiple systems, each of which I had previously used Finnix on the same USB flashdrive with in earlier versions.
I haven't had time yet to track down which version these problems begin on for me just yet. I have skipped several versions on my flash drive just due to plain laziness.
Finnix Forums » Bugs
Booting from USB broken in snapshot?
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Posted Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:44:44 -0800
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Works fine for me. Are you making sure that you're using the minirt that came with the snapshot?
bootusb and bootscsi were actually both deprecated in 88.0, boot modules are now loaded based on what probed PCI devices are found. Go into debug, are the *hci modules being loaded?Posted Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:11:37 -0800 -
How strange, you're right, it does still work in this version. Either the problem was a particular combination of depreciated options (I just removed them all and started over) or maybe something to do with this particular flash drive (though I'm pretty sure I remember trying it on my old flash drive that never game me any troubles too, and the fact that it's now booting on each try kind of makes this hard to believe, though it does still take at least one retry and usually two to actually find the device.) Either way, it's booting from USB now. Sorry about that, seems it's not a Finnix bug probably, or at least if it is it's due to using parameters you shouldn't be using anyway.
EDIT: It just happened to me again. Maybe it is somehow the flash drive itself, though it's rather curious that it works long enough to boot up and get the kernel and initrd ok. I removed the drive and put it back in, then rebooted and tried again a few times and it was able to autodetect the drive finally after a while. Also, when I removed it and put it back in sometimes it wouldn't show up on the debug console either. I'm actually wondering if there could be something funny going on in the USB mass storage drivers or something here because I haven't ever seen it fail to show up in windows yet.Posted Thu, 16 Nov 2006 03:01:12 -0800 -
You could try usb installers of www.grml.org (very heavily similar distro to finnix) & see how they work - grml2usb for the low-mem flash thumbs or grml2hd for usb disks
Posted Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:46:07 -0800