Re: Faulty BIOS or GRUB issue (USB Stick won't boot)

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko <phcoder@gmail.com>]

Daniel Mierswa wrote:
> Hey list,
> in January this year I got my hands dirty with a laptop and tried
> booting it via USB stick. The thing is that, when installed to the MBR
> of the stick, the BIOS just won't detect it and print "Operating
> system not found" and skips to reading the MBR from HDD. If I install
> it into the active boot partition of the stick, it will show me the
> "GRUB " notification_string (boot/i386/pc/boot.S). I'm currently
> booting this stick via syslinux which then loads a GRUB image I
> created with lnxboot.img. However I find this very impractical, as I
> need to find the UUID of the stick (which GRUB then sees as fd0) and
> load a configuration which itself loads the real GRUB configuration. I
> received quite a few help during that time of year by Robert and
> daChaac via IRC, and I also posted this on help-grub@ but got no
> answer there. I bring this up again, because someone else faced the
> same issue with another USB stick (until that point I seemed to be the
> only one facing it). I "debug"ed as good as I could by putting the
> output of the notification string in the boot.S file to several places
> and reboot. It comes to the point where it executes `jmp
> *(kernel_address)`.
> If anyone has any idea how to go on with this issue, I'd welcome it.
> Thanks in advance.
>
This behaviour is probably caused by BIOS exposing first partition as a
disk. I would consider this a BIOS bug. A workaround could be following:
losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/usb
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/usb /dev/loop0
Don't forget to apply fezie's bugfix for root-directory

Does anyone know a better workaround?