1 Topic by merk

  • merk
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Topic: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

hi all,

burnt a gparted disk. I can boot from this disk just fine on my pc. I popped it into my friends pc and after about 2-3 minutes it eventually fails saying unable to find a medium containing a live file system

does this just mean his pc is having problems reading from the cd?  I actually tried burning a 2nd cd at the slowest speed - still fails.

I'm going to see if i can make a bootable thumb drive tomorrow unless someone has any suggestions how i can get it working with the cd.

thanks

2 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

Hi,

this message means the the PC's BIOS is able to boot off the CD. From there, a boot loader is run, which reads the Linux kernel and the initial ramdisk (which contains drivers and tools that must be present before any storage media can be accessed) into memory and starts the kernel. The kernel then boots up, starts some scripts from the initrd - and finally, during this stage, the live file system is searched. In your case, this step fails - and you get an error message.

Possible reasons could be:
- a CD-ROM drive that is broken or does not work well with Linux (especially older drives can cause problems here); or
- a storage controller that is not supported by the kernel on the Live CD.

3 Reply by merk

  • merk
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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

Thank you for the explanation. So then it's not the result of a bad cd - i was going to try burning it to dvd instead and try that, but from your explanation it sounds like that wont work.

Assuming i ever manage to make a bootable gparted thumb drive, would this work or will it still try to load the faulty drive/controller and fail?

thanks

4 Reply by cmdr

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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

Hello merk,

Assuming i ever manage to make a bootable gparted thumb drive, would this work or will it still try to load the faulty drive/controller and fail?

The motherboard (or PCI-Slot based) storage controllers are responsible for the built-in harddisks (eSATA also for external), optical drives, tape / zip drives etc. USB connected devices have their own controller on the motherboard and are integrated via software drivers, which care about them, if they are correctly detected. E.g. USB sticks are "emulated" as storage devices (several different kinds are possible: "superfloppy", harddisk and even CDROM, according to their respective format).

Conclusions:
1. "GParted Live" on USB stick might work on your friends PC, provided it can boot from USB storage devices other than ZIP drives.
2. Connecting an USB-CDROM-drive will probably also work, if bootable.

To get a working "GParted" on an USB stick isn't that difficult. You have three possibilities :
1.http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtop … 368#p12368
2.http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php
3. "My method", which I use exclusively for all my sticks and multiboot HDDs (several Linux / Windows versions). The advantage is, that you do not overwrite DOS-MBR/PBR with Linux Bootloaders, and therefore restoring a pure DOS boot is very easy. The bootloader, I use is "Grub4DOS"(GRLDR). It is able to boot Win98/ME, W2K, XP, Vista and all Linux distros. It accepts as bootmedia HDDs, CDROMs, Linux distros on USB-Sticks, even if the PC cannot boot from USB, and floppy images. No need anymore to change boot sequence in BIOS. If you have two built-in HDDs with bootable partition(s) on each, you can choose by "Grub" menu, which one to start (bootflag doesn't matter !). If you are interested, I can give you the details, how to proceed.

Normally WinXP does not accept partitioned USB Sticks (shows only first partition), but there is a small driver from Hitachi, which enables this feature. As stick sizes are now big enough to use it, I consequently separate data, media and programs in its own volumes. I don't keep it as a secret, if you are interested.

Regards
cmdr

5 Reply by merk

  • merk
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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

thank you very much for the information.

I actually tried option 2 and didn't have any luck. I even posted a thread about it: http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=9810 basically after following the steps it tells me if i cant find the kernel image. I'm pretty sure i followed all the steps.

I haven't seen the first option before so i'll give that a try.

regarding your method - i'm a little hesitant to try that since i prefer using something that doesn't require any changes to the disk. That's why i like booting from the cd (or usb) so much since there's no need to install anything or make any changes on disk just to use the program.

I will however consider it if nothing else works.

and i would defintely be interested in a multi partition USB stick. I dont suppose i'd be able to make one partition a boot partition and then stick data on the rest?

thanks again. I'll post back with my results from option 1.

6 Reply by merk

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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

SUCCESS!!! with option 1

thanks so much for that link. makes things incredibly easy for me smile I was just able to boot off the USB key using my laptop. I'll try it on my friends PC later today. I'm pretty sure it will allow him to boot from USB since it's a relatively new (less then 1 year) PC from dell and both my desktop at work here and laptop are also dell's and they allow you to boot from usb.

thanks again for the help.

7 Reply by cmdr (edited by cmdr 2009-01-22 01:52:42)

  • cmdr
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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

Hello merk,

well "Dell"; don't be disappointed, but there are some models, which are known, not to be compatible with most Linux distros. I recently had that problem ...

and i would defintely be interested in a multi partition USB stick. I dont suppose i'd be able to make one partition a boot partition and then stick data on the rest?

Sure, you can have a separate boot partition; even an extended partition with logical drives is possible.
Win XP sees the stick as a removable USB harddisk. And of course, "GParted" does the partitioning !
Perhaps you open a new thread for this purpose ("Win XP does not see my partitioned USB Stick" or so; then it's easier to find for others).

Regards
cmdr

8 Reply by merk

  • merk
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Re: unable to find a medium containing a live file system

oh bummer, that would suck if true. Well if that happens i could always pull his hard drive out and hook it up my PC and clone it that way. Or if i need to, download a trial of acronis and use that to do the copy.