Willing wheels

Today started badly. I plugged my usb stick on a computer as a regular usb stick. I removed it without unmounting it at first, then I inserted it on my computer to boot into my ubuntu installed on that stick and it no longer booted!!!!

I kept getting that ugly “No operating system found!” error.

I checked all usb ports and got the same error message.

Finally here is what I did:

1. insert my usb stick on a computer already running debian/ubuntu
2. stick automatically got mounted to /media/disk => I looked for its name using “mount -l” and found out it is mapped to “/dev/sdb1″
3. unmount it (sudo umount /media/disk)
4. searched for errors:

   sudo fsck -t ext3 /dev/sdb1

   ubuntu was intalled on the usb pen using an ext3 filetype
   => no errors were found

   fsck 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
   /dev/sdb1 : clean, 161474/230608 files, 823156/921721 blocs

5. checked that my first usb pen partition was still bootable:

   sudo cfdisk /dev/sdb

   Surprise!!! it was no longer bootable => I flagged the first partition as bootable and wrote data to disk.

6. I tried to boot from the usb pen => it did not work => something else is missing
7. Inserted back my usb pen on my debian computer, and reinstalled grub on it:

   sudo grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/media/disk /dev/sdb

8. I unmounted the usb pen, tried to boot and it worked just as before!!!

Good luck.

sources

• http://rudd-o.com/en/linux-and-free-software/a-better-way-to-create-a-customized-ubuntu-live-usb-drive

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 1:34 pm and is filed under unix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.