Booting VIA EPIA PX Mainboard from USB

Apr 20, 2008 1 Replies

The Embedded Systems Conference gave away ARTiGO Pico-ITX PCs this year to "full" attendees. I was pleasantly surprised to get it -- usually speakers don't get the full range of freebies.



At any rate, I have this thing with Windows CE installed on it, but what _I_ really want is to get more milage with Linux. Since this is a spare time project I'm trying to do this while spending no more than ten times the purchase price of the PC -- and 0 * 10 = 0.



I've got a copy of Damn Small Linux on a bootable memory stick, and I've tested it on one of my laptops and it works -- but it doesn't work on the ARTiGO machine. If worse comes to worst I can slap the thing's hard drive into a laptop and install a linux distro on it, then put it back into the ARTiGO machine, but I'd rather be able to boot off a stick if I can.



Does anyone out there know how to induce a VIA EPIA PX mainboard to boot from a memory stick? It's bios gives one several boot choices including USB-FDD, USB-ZIP, and USB-CD, but either none of these work with a stick or I'm not fondling the thing quite right, because I'm not getting it to boot.



Thanks in advance.


Tim Wescott Control systems and communications consulting http://www.wescottdesign.com Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system? "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

Never mind -- the answer is that you have to go into BIOS (using delete, _not_ escape), and tell that the _hard drive_ that you want to boot from is the USB port.

I find it interesting that it treats CD drives, USB CD, USB FDD, USB ZIP and others as distinct entities, yet a thumb drive is just another flavor of hard drive.

Oh well -- you learn something new every day.

Tim Wescott Control systems and communications consulting http://www.wescottdesign.com Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system? "Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html

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