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usb boot via pxe cdrom slow

Posted: 29 Jul 2013, 12:53
by crass
Hi all,

I installed to a 512mb usb stick using unetbootin. Boots fine on my sony vaio laptop. Just tried on my old dell latitude cpx. I know I cannot boot directly from usb so I burned a cd, booted from that, and tried to take advantage of using the cdrom to boot usb installation. That took off fine BTW but it took so long I stopped the effort.

Why is it so slow from a usb stick? Should I have booted the usb into ram?

cheers and tia faa.

crass

Re: usb boot via pxe cdrom slow

Posted: 29 Jul 2013, 13:26
by donald
Hi crass
Could it be that your dell has only usb 1.1 or less which is rather slow?
How many RAM do you have? (dell)
Copy to ram with less than 1GB is a "not so good idea", but it also depends on,
which DE you are using.

copy2ram:

... Copy all modules to RAM. You'll need at least 256MB of RAM
to boot Porteus properly. 64-bit Porteus with KDE-4 requires
at least 768MB of RAM for this.
Copy2ram slows down the boot phase but speeds up Porteus!

Re: usb boot via pxe cdrom slow

Posted: 29 Jul 2013, 14:41
by crass
Hi Donald

Its Plop not pxe that I am using to boot - sorry about that.

I know it has aprox 500mb ram. It is old though so I imagine it is usb 1.1. The machine itself is circa 2000.

I am trying again this time with usb 1.1 enabled (I found a menu to alter settings) and installing to ram. Still loading initrd.xz for roughly 5-10 minutes now.

I am really unsure which DE its using - it could be xfce or kde - i'm really unsure about that. The image I burned was about 300mb.

cheers

PS the livecd version detected the pcmcia network card straight away - which is good - and the machine avoided over heating and turning an unstoppable fan on.

Re: usb boot via pxe cdrom slow

Posted: 30 Jul 2013, 16:42
by fanthom
@crass
if usb and cdrom are too slow than maybe you could install porteus on a hd? porteus should work very fast from it.

if you have any linux installed on hd already then i would suggest you adding extra entry for it in the bootloader config (many grub examples posted on the forum). if you have a windows then grub4dos should be the best choice (to avoid overwriting of the MBR).

Re: usb boot via pxe cdrom slow

Posted: 30 Jul 2013, 18:56
by crass
@fanthom - yeah, it did pop in the noodle whether I could add an entry into an existing bootloader to boot an os on an usb stick. Thanks for the confirmation. However on the hd of the old latitude is freebsd - it handles the fan ie switches it off when temperature reached, something that no linux distro has been able to do. I would need to rtfm on the freebsd bootlaoder.

The cdrom version boots fine at an acceptable speed. If not better than acceptable.

Its razor-qt that I seem to be using.

cheers