I used the instructions on this webpage to create a bootable USB drive for running Ubuntu 9.10. Unfortunately it doesn't work on my Eee PC.
Even with 'Removable Dev.' selected in the BIOS as the first boot device, the PC just boots into Windows 7.
How do I troubleshoot this problem?
The drive is readable and looks like this:
Directory of E:\
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> .disk
28/10/2009 21:14 222 README.diskdefines
28/10/2009 21:14 143 autorun.inf
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> casper
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> dists
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> install
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> syslinux
28/10/2009 21:14 4,098 md5sum.txt
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> pics
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> pool
28/10/2009 21:14 <DIR> preseed
28/10/2009 21:14 0 ubuntu
26/10/2009 16:16 1,468,640 wubi.exe
25/02/2010 00:28 2,147,483,648 casper-rw
8 Dir(s) 5,290,307,584 bytes free
Best Answer
The problem was that 'removable dev' doesn't mean 'USB drive' (I'm not sure what it is, can't think of any other removable devices that I could connect to this Eee PC...)
As a result, putting 'removable dev' at the top of the boot device list didn't work.
When searching through the boot options again, I went into the 'Hard Drives' menu and found USB in this list. When I moved USB to the top of the hard drives list, the Eee PC booted successfully into the Ubuntu boot menu! You can't prioritise HDDs in the main list, they're delegated to this other priority list. When I changed the Hard Drives list, the main list changed to show USB in place of my HDD's name (NB: without a USB drive plugged in, the PC boots from HDD.)
So, for some reason the Eee PC BIOS thinks of USB drives as hard drives. Well, I guess they're not floppies...
Incidentally, I can't believe how good Ubuntu is compared to my previous experiences of Linux. Really slick. (So far at least).