Re: Booting VIA EPIA PX Mainboard from USB

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:12:03 -0500, Tim Wescott wrote:

The Embedded Systems Conference gave away ARTiGO Pico-ITX PCs this year
to "full" attendees. I was pleasantly surprised to get it -- usually
speakers don't get the full range of freebies.

At any rate, I have this thing with Windows CE installed on it, but what
_I_ really want is to get more milage with Linux. Since this is a spare
time project I'm trying to do this while spending no more than ten times
the purchase price of the PC -- and 0 * 10 = 0.

I've got a copy of Damn Small Linux on a bootable memory stick, and I've
tested it on one of my laptops and it works -- but it doesn't work on
the ARTiGO machine. If worse comes to worst I can slap the thing's hard
drive into a laptop and install a linux distro on it, then put it back
into the ARTiGO machine, but I'd rather be able to boot off a stick if I
can.

Does anyone out there know how to induce a VIA EPIA PX mainboard to boot
from a memory stick? It's bios gives one several boot choices including
USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, and USB-CD, but either none of these work with a stick
or I'm not fondling the thing quite right, because I'm not getting it to
boot.

Thanks in advance.

Never mind -- the answer is that you have to go into BIOS (using delete,
_not_ escape), and tell that the _hard drive_ that you want to boot from
is the USB port.

I find it interesting that it treats CD drives, USB CD, USB FDD, USB ZIP
and others as distinct entities, yet a thumb drive is just another flavor
of hard drive.

Oh well -- you learn something new every day.

--
Tim Wescott
Control systems and communications consulting
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott
Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
.

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