I just want to say I feel the frustration of those trying to get these fromiso's to boot. I've also had substantial problems with this. I think we inherited something from MEPIS, because my tricks with plop to make bootable usb sticks for my older machine also work with MEPIS. I've only got two machines I work with, an EEE PC and a old Sony 900 mhz Duron laptop w/ 512 mb ram. The Sony was not designed for usb booting, and does not support usb 2.0. It has the same issues with not finding the antix filesystem as the other posters here, whether booting from usb or doing fromiso boots from the HD. Now, I did eventually get mine working with plop as my posts people have cited here indicate. There is not much mystery to that process. I watched my boot messages and put the /antiX/antiX squashfs file in the root of the parition that the boot messages indicated were being looked in to find it. I'm also lucky that its CD is still working. The nice thing about the old sony is that the boot messages go by slow enough to read.

In reading the posts here about this issue as well as other posts at mepislovers.org, I think our fromiso doesn't work at all or very well on older, slower machines. The machines in question all seem to have low ram or slow processors, or both. Since that is part of the target audience for antiX, this is why we are seeing all the issues and not the mepis guys. most people with these older machines won't be trying mepis anyway.

While I don't know how to fix it, I'm certainly up for testing any fixes that do come along.

As I said before, I suspect it has to to with the live script which, if I remember well, is in initrd.gz. The live setup is where antiX and MEPIS are brothers, if not twins.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to interpret that script clearly but maybe some extra delay in there could help?
(BTW d.o., it's not so straightforward to extract the initrd.gz but the instructions are online)

@secipolla - I know, I tried looking in there once after you mentioned it elsewhere. I think you are right about this.

dolphin_oracle wrote: I watched my boot messages and put the /antiX/antiX squashfs file in the root of the parition that the boot messages indicated were being looked in to find it. I'm also lucky that its CD is still working. The nice thing about the old sony is that the boot messages go by slow enough to read.

I envy your slow boot messages __{{emoticon}}__ What I don't see when I look a the messages is any indication that a drive letter is allocated for any USB connected devices. I see an allocation for the optical drive. My laptop is capable of booting from USB and does so with other distros that I have tried like Puppy, Slitaz and Pclinuxos.

terraport,

That's how I created my work around. My usb wasn't even being looked at, and I was getting messages that it was looking for the filesystem on two of my internal partitions. So the situation sounds similar. I simply put the antiX/antiX file where the boot messages said it was looking, and it found it and continued to boot.

I am afraid that it looks to me like Antix is deficient. I cannot get it to boot from USB disk drives with my laptop computers. I tried image_dir=antix and image_name=antiX but there is no difference as it appears to me that the startup script doesn't even look in the attached USB drives. It only looks in the CD and internal hard drives.

The laptops boot from USB with PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Mint, Crunchbang, Slax, Puppy and Slitaz. So why not AntiX, especially as it is promoted as being for older hardware.

terraport,

As a long time user of antiX, I have watched this thread evolve and with your last last remark,

I am afraid that it looks to me like Antix is deficient. I cannot get it to boot from USB disk drives with my laptop computers

coupled with one of your first posts

Based on my reading of this thread and the multiple other complaints that I have seen on the same subject that never get resolved, I think there is a culture of denial going on here. I believe there is an underlying problem with the way antix starts up but I will be happy if you show me I am wrong and successfully help me.

1. You hijacked the post, gave a lot of criticism, and very little info. It is common courtesy to start your own thread and then when resolved others will find it when searching for a similar problem. BTW many of the issues have been resolved, including the thread that you hijacked. So never does not apply.
2. You tried to provoke a resolution by challenging the community, and if WE don't fix your problem then you won't be happy!!! (Almost crossing the line to trolling)
3. anticapitalista volunteers his time to produce this outstanding distro, and the others involved with antiX also volunteer their time in many areas. We are all volunteers.
4. If you really want to resolve the problem.

I cannot get it to boot from USB disk drives with my laptop computers

Why don't you start your own thread and give us some information, like run the antiX livecd, with your usb hard drive connected and from a terminal post the following information.
Of course first check that your iso md5sum is correct and the livecd's md5sum is correct.

inxi -F
lsusb
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

then as root (sux)
fdisk -l

Then detail exactly what you did when the failure occurred, document it with the error messages produced by that attempt so they can be analyzed and then addressed.

This would at a minimum get us started on exactly what the problem is, I have booted antiX from usb harddrives, thumbdrives, others from sd cards as well. I run antiX on an old dell laptop, a somewhat newer dell, a Toshiba laptop, and a dell desktop. Most of the problems I have run into over the years have been my own inability to assess the problem and apply the correct procedure, it may be that your hardware is deficient or it is operator error. Sometimes a different kernel is needed for some hardware. We are not psychic's though as what little info you gave is supposed to motivate us to resolve your problem. Perhaps you just want to cause dissension, we don't know as you gave us nothing but vague information with a lot of unfounded attacks because you can't get it to work.

ohh

I had this problem while running live usb on a older computer. I did not mean to come across this fix myself, but I just got mad and left it doing a reboot. It worked after doing this so I turned it off and just let it run through again without any input. Again it found the file system and booted. Mabey try just letting it go by itself, there might be a timeout issue.

Sorry did not realize there was 3 pages on this post but I will leave this on there just the same

oldhoghead wrote: 1. You hijacked the post, gave a lot of criticism, and very little info. It is common courtesy to start your own thread and then when resolved others will find it when searching for a similar problem.

I thought it was common courtesy to use an existing thread that already had the same problem in the title because then the same groundwork doesn't have to be redone and the board doesn't get cluttered up with dozens of threads with the same title. If that was wrong then I apologise.

BTW many of the issues have been resolved, including the thread that you hijacked. So never does not apply.

All right I chose the wrong thread, I chose a recent active one but there are plenty of others where this is not solved. In this thread the OP appears from my limited ability to have had a mismatch between the bootloader designation for the boot device and what the Antix startup thought it was and so the startup looked in the wrong place. This was resolved by getting them both to refer to the USB drive in the same way. When I first posted I thought that it was similar in my case but I now know that my problem is worse than that as the init script does not search in the USB drives at all, regardless of how they are called. I have tried referring to them by UUID and it makes no difference.

2. You tried to provoke a resolution by challenging the community, and if WE don't fix your problem then you won't be happy!!! (Almost crossing the line to trolling)

Sensitive much? As I said, there are many threads with my issue and not just on this board but on other general Linux help forums. Other distros including PClinuxos search and find my attached USB boot devices. I mention PClinuxos specifically because I found that whatever search method it uses seems to be more forgiving of placement of the file system and yet still searches faster than some other distros that I tried.

Why don't you start your own thread and give us some information, like run the antiX livecd, with your usb hard drive connected.

Okay I will look for more info but I don't have a CD drive so cannot do that part.

Most of the problems I have run into over the years have been my own inability to assess the problem and apply the correct procedure

I am fine if I am the one at fault which is why I came here. However, after seeing that AntiX doesn't even search for the file system on my attached USB devices then I am inclined to think that it is not me that is at fault.

it may be that your hardware is deficient

HP/Compaq Pentium III laptops. I would assume they are within the target market of AntiX.

Perhaps you just want to cause dissension, we don't know as you gave us nothing but vague information with a lot of unfounded attacks because you can't get it to work.

Dissension about what? It either works or it doesn't and currently it doesn't work for me. I would have thought that at the very least you would be interested in the possibility of an underlying deficiency in the start up process which might cause people to just walk away from AntiX without even getting to see it even though they tried.