I’m posting this hopes of helping people who google this, because I just spent two fucking hours finding it out. Here goes:
If you have a Via Epia M (EpiaM, Epia-M) motherboard in your barebone computer, and you want to boot from a USB Stick or USB Hard Drive, you have to know three things:
- In the Bios, set the boot device to USB-ZIP
- Also in the Bios, activate the USB-Keyboard option
- Finally, before you plug in either a USB keyboard or your USB drive, remove the power chord of your barebone computer! Don’t just turn it off; in order for the Epia M to recognize a USB drive or keyboard, you have to completely cut its power before you plug either of these in.
Those were infuriating two hours yesterday evening! HTH
In the next days, I’m going to post my experiences and maybe even a HOWTO on creating a software RAID on Linux.
Thank you so much. I was going crazy with this one.
This looks good, but didn’t work with my EPIA ML 6000 EAG LVDS board.
Using a TrekStore 1GB Stick with Knoppix 5.1 on it.
Thank You,
Now It works:
USB-Keyboard OFF, Bootdrive USB-HDD.
Booting works only if the power chord is removed.
thank you… i needed more than 2 hours ;)
I have an EPIA-M. I concurr with Andreas, removing power entirely is the solution. Otherwise you can change all the options in the world and it won’t make a difference.
So to recap, for you to be able to boot from USB-CD USB-DVD and any other USB attached device, you MUST remove power (unplug the darn thing).
Wow, I can’t believe THAT was the problem. I had all the bios settings right and it didn’t work. I found your page, unplugged the power and IT WORKED. Thanks so much, it really helped a lot.
I cannt belive that it worked, which has troubled me for weeks. Greate thanks for your execllent work, Awesome guy.
This hint is very very useful! I was going crazy, no wake on lan, power on keyboard was working! I spent hours to find out whats wrong.
THANKS!!!
THANK YOU very much!! I spent an hour to get this working – no change. Then i asked Dr. Google and here i am, it’s working now!
Thank god for google. My frigging hubby was bitching about this stupid thing being “another hunk of crap”. I wanted to smash it!!! Thank you!!
Thank you! Saved me a lot of heartache!
thank you SO Much! I can’t believe i’m even trying to still use a EPIA-M. There are a lot of better ones out there these days …
oh, the old power toggle. classic!
thx, sir.
I’ve recently got a Debian install working on an EPIA-M and discovered work arounds for two problems:
I couldn’t install it on the USB drive without hardware/port errors after about 10 minutes. Turns out two of the 1000uF 10V Capacitors had gone bad (visibly bulging). Replaced them and heavy duty flash writing went fine (it is ~8 year old board now)
The second problem was booting gave errors. Grub loaded, but couldn’t load the kenerl/initrd. Something about end of disk. Turns out you need a /boot partition so I made a 40Mb one on my 1Gb card. Fixed!
Looks like boot from CDROM must also be disabled. Otherwise CDROM takes precedence. It worked for me (using USB-keyboard) by setting boot 1 USB-HDD, boot 2 HDD-0, and the others disabled, saving, exiting, and cutting power.
Very helpfull guide.
It save me to smash my server!