Can't get 32 bit to boot from stick or hard drive

[rustleg]

In my 32 bit PC I burnt the 32 bit version to a DVD and it runs ok. I put it on a stick and tried to run from the stick, it only gets to the following line then stalls:
Booting [/boot/kernel/kernel] ...
There is some activity such as flashing of the keyboard lights then the stick led lights up and stays lit with no further activity.

I tried to run the stick in my 64 bit machine and it gets to just after this point (can't remember what was on the screen - not much more) then the machine just reboots itself.

I installed the 32 bit version to a 160GB hard drive in the 32 bit PC - this is the second of 2 drives in this system*. The install appeared to go ok but when I tried to boot it the boot manager says the partition is not bootable.

* note that there are 8 primary partitions on the first drive of the 32 bit PC - Terabyte Unlimited's Bootit boot manager intercepts the boot process with its own code in the MBR and fiddles the DOS partition table to put any 4 of these in the table before transferring control to the boot item in the relevant partition. Not sure if this will present a problem for KNOS, but I have a similar configuration (with more drives) in the 64 bit PC which has been able to run KNOS from hard disc on the RC without any boot problem.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Sorry to say, but we can't support other boot managers. KNOS *has* to run on a native drive with its own formatting. KNOS uses its own boot sector and depends on BIOS being able to tell it where its drive is. Once KNOS queries BIOS for the location of that drive (in other words, you can have as many native drives as BIOS supports) then KNOS takes it from there, completely ignoring any boot managers such as GRUB or anything else. From the BIOS pointing to which device is the KNOS drive, it then seeks its own boot sector which is hard-coded.

Reason for this is that there's plenty of boot sector viruses out there including some which are able to layer in BIOS items of their own to spy on whatever operating system is loaded using hardware calls in an extended boot sector to keylog and do lots of other nasty bits. By designing KNOS to ignore all outside boot sectors, we can assure that nothing is going to be run other than KNOS itself with no "interlopers." But in order to do so, KNOS expects to find its own boot sector in what we refer to as "location zero" ... no jumps to other locations are permitted and boot managers have to relocate everything in order to do those kind of tricks. Not allowed. (I'll repeat this in the other message since that appears to be a similar issue)

As to the stick not booting, the only things that changed from the RC to the release was the addition of some additional apps in Gnome such as Vidalia for TOR, the language/keyboard selector tool and Imagination and the Openshot Video editor. There were no kernel changes required, so I can only assume that either the USB settings in BIOS or settings for "AHCI" having to do with the hard drive types. KNOS normally goes with factory default settings in BIOS, so I'd have to guess that's where the problem is since once again, nothing changed in our kernel from RC to release.

[rustleg]

May 20, 2012 19:09:17 GMT -5 Kevin McAleavey said:

Sorry to say, but we can't support other boot managers. KNOS *has* to run on a native drive with its own formatting. ...

I agree that you can't support different boot managers but I am trying to run KNOS on its own drive and the KNOS formatting hasn't been altered post installation. I'll reply in more detail on the other post re the 64 bit prefs.

[Kevin McAleavey]

May 21, 2012 16:52:20 GMT -5 rustleg said:

May 20, 2012 19:09:17 GMT -5 Kevin McAleavey said:

Sorry to say, but we can't support other boot managers. KNOS *has* to run on a native drive with its own formatting. ...

I agree that you can't support different boot managers but I am trying to run KNOS on its own drive and the KNOS formatting hasn't been altered post installation. I'll reply in more detail on the other post re the 64 bit prefs.

I'll go for this then over in the other thread as well:

knosproject.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=knos9&action=display&thread=193

But I'll just add here that when KNOS makes a stick, it hard-codes that device location when it's made. If you have different systems set up differently, then that stick might not be landing where it should be if things are moved around. Hopefully my explanation of how that all works in the above thread might result in that "aha!" light bulb glowing.