Re: Bootable USB images

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 02:52:25PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Is there something you special-cased when handling CDs or not-CDs? (For
> example, grub-legacy doesn’t handle iso9660 from media with !2048by
> sectors at all.)

There is, but I don't think it has any relation to this problem.  iso9660
filesystems in non-CD are known-stable code.  Only the boot mechanism is new.

In fact, I have some ideas on what could be causing this, but unless I can
reproduce it, I'm wary of sending shots in the dark.  And despite all my
efforts I've been unable to reproduce it:

  - I grabbed Aurelien's mini.iso and extracted its files.
  - I used the same version of grub-pc and grub-common as Aurelien
    (1.98~20091229-1) to generate a new image.
  - I did this on kfreebsd-i386 (I specifically installed the i386
    flavour to test this).

I also tried today's Bazaar trunk and kfreebsd-amd64 before that.  It _always_
works for me.

Except when I use the mini.iso directly, of course, but that's not very
useful...

Aurelien, could you try building the image in another environment?  E.g.
kfreebsd-amd64 and/or using a newer grub-pc.

I'd also check if grub-mkfloppy works in your env, the boot codepath is
very similar.

-- 
Robert Millan

  "Be the change you want to see in the world" -- Gandhi