Tuesday, August 03, 2010

I hate Linux

Yet another reason why I hate Linux:

SystemRescueCd, a Linux distro designed for administering or repairing a system, doesn't boot and stops with the following error:

!! Cannot find device with /sysrcd.dat. Retrying...

After a bit of googling, it turns out that this occurs because Linux can't detect the USB CD-ROM that was used to boot it. This use case isn't QA'd anymore. Apparently, the solution is to use a USB stick instead.

But what happens if you use a USB stick? It doesn't work:

[root@soulfury mnt]# mount -o loop,exec ~simoncpu/Desktop/systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso cdrom
[root@soulfury mnt]# cd cdrom
[root@soulfury cdrom]# ls
bootdisk bootprog isolinux ntpasswd sysrcd.dat sysrcd.md5 usb_inst usb_inst.sh usbstick.htm version
[root@soulfury cdrom]# bash usb_inst.sh
No valid USB/Removable device has been detected on your system

I checked the usb_inst.sh source code, and it makes some invalid assumptions on what a USB stick is. Blah. I need to sleep.

No comments: