Hyperion Entertainment Message Boards

If I have a FAT formatted flash drive plugged into any USB port, OS4 won't boot. The system gets to the OS4.1FE boot image and stops. I cold booted (reset) with an OS4.1update6 boot partition and the problem doesn't occur. Can anyone else confirm this bug so it can be entered in the bug tracker and fixed?

I can confirm it, but it's not bug per seh.

It happens when you leave a bootable USB stick in, and as you can now boot from FAT (or at least see it a boot time, due the CrossDOSFileSystem now being in kickstart for access to the SD Card) if you leave a bootable disk in the system with no OS on it , te OS won't boot. Exactly as if you left a bootable blank floppy in a classic.

If you hold both mouse buttons down to go to early startup you will see the USB stick in the drive at priority of about 8 IIRC.

To avoid this problem, you can

1, Not leave bootable USB stick in unless you wont to boot from them. Unfortunatly the bootable status of freshly purchased FAT USB sticks seems random (or atleast varies from manufacturer to manufactuere) so this is difficult to predict in advance.

2. Ensure that
os4_bootdevice=auto

is set in CFE so that oyu are *not* relying on *boot priorty* to choose which partition to boot the OS from. Rather you will always boot from the aprtition that you loaded kickstart from.

You can disable this option in a specific boot menu if you think you will occasionally need to bootby priotity. Perhaps for example you actually wont to boot from a SFS formatted usb stick.

3. Set BOOTDEVICE in the kickstart which achieves the same as the above, but allows you to choose a different partition.

@broadblues
If by SD card you mean a Compact Flash card plugged into the internal CF slot then I'd say they've created a huge inconvenience for people not using a CF card to please the few people that are using one. Every time I want to reboot I have to disconnect my external USB drive and walk over to my printer and remove the USB flash drive.

I can reboot with a music CD in my CDROM and the system boots fine. If the system can tell if a CD is bootable, surely the same can be done for USB. In the meantime, if the problem is actually a result of USB priority being set to 8, I'll try boosting all my partition priorities above the USB priority and see if that works. Thanks for the info.

yes Compact flash, I knew when I was typeing SD I was using the wrong term but could think of the right one!

Uping the disk priortiy might well work but it may mess up your abilty to boot from CD.

As to the audio CD thing, audio CDs are not bootable, excopet perhaps very rare CDExtras with bonus content on them, so the OS will never try to boot from them.

THe "problem" only occurs with a *Bootable* usb stick. If you can mark your sticvks non bootable in windows then the issue will go away (don't know how to do that, just guessing it must be possible ).

[edit]
You need to reformat the disk and not choose the bootable option, might in that case be possible from amigaos
[/edit]

Also if you are 100% sure you don't want boot time access to the Compact Flash card you can comment out the L/CrossDosFileSystem entry in the kicklayout.

Then only amiga OS formatted USB sticks will boot.

@broadblues
Commenting out L/CrossDosFileSystem works, as does changing the priority of my primary boot partition. There is only one priority slot available if you want a CD to remain the highest priority. With the default USB priority set to 8 and the default CD bootpriority set to 10, that only leaves "9" for a partiton priority. The OS4 devs should raise the CD boot priority to 15 or 20 to allow more available priority slots between USB and CD for those with multiple boot partitions. In the end I decided to comment out the L/CrossDOSFilesystem entry in Kicklayout because it's easier to change back than changing boot priorities. If I want a bootable USB flash drive, I''ll format it with SFS.

After a lot of testing to solve this issue, I don't see much point in a bootable USB stick or CF card. My system cold boots from the hard disk and then warm boots (Amiga boot) from a USB stick if it's bootable. Unless a CF card can cold boot (reset or computer turn on) I don't know why anyone would install one.