1 Topic by sixdeaftaxis

  • sixdeaftaxis
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  • Registered: 2010-02-26
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Topic: Unable to boot gparted live usb on Dell.

I am trying to extend the primary partition on my Dell Optiplex 755 to take up the adjacent unallocated space where I deleted a second partition.

I downloaded gparted-live-0.5.1-1.iso and created live usb on a freshly formatted (FAT) 2Gb Lexar flash drive using unetbootin from Windows XP Pro.

Restarted the computer, hit F12 at the Dell logo to select boot device. Selected USB device and hit enter.

After a while, I got the message "NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot."

Rebooting from the primary partition into Windows XP Professional still works fine, but I can't figure out how to get the computer to boot from the USB flash drive.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

2 Reply by sixdeaftaxis

  • sixdeaftaxis
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Re: Unable to boot gparted live usb on Dell.

I finally found a blank CD and burned the .iso file to it and booted off the CD drive. Everything went great after that, and I am just booting into XP after it ran its chkdsk procedure.

Still curious as to why it wouldn't boot off the USB flash drive, but no longer really need it, at least for now.

3 Reply by cmdr

  • cmdr
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Re: Unable to boot gparted live usb on Dell.

Hello sixdeaftaxis

sixdeaftaxis wrote:

After a while, I got the message "NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot."
...
Still curious as to why it wouldn't boot off the USB flash drive, but no longer really need it, at least for now.

The fault message comes from the Partition Boot Record (PBR) of your USB stick. After using unetbootin your USB stick should have a syslinux Master Boot Record, which does NOT jump to the PBR code, but to file syslinux.bin. Obviously this did NOT happen , so something must have gone wrong with the unetbootin configuration.

BTW, you know, that the ISO image may also be used to create a bootable USB stick directly, due to its "ISOhybrid" format? You simply have to copy it sector-by-sector to your stick (with dd for windows or an appropriate hexeditor). Disadvantage is, that you loose all other content, if any.

Regards
cmdr

4 Reply by pauls

  • pauls
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  • Registered: 2010-04-08
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Re: Unable to boot gparted live usb on Dell.

sixdeaftaxis wrote:

I finally found a blank CD and burned the .iso file to it and booted off the CD drive. Everything went great after that, and I am just booting into XP after it ran its chkdsk procedure.

Still curious as to why it wouldn't boot off the USB flash drive, but no longer really need it, at least for now.

I had the same trouble and didn't want to just go from the iso to the usb stick, i think if have a pretty big collection of OS's on sticks ubuntu being my favorite. Amazed at how much they hold now when data recovery in the 90's meant stacks of floppies and a whopping 100mb zip disk.