I have moved the MythTV box and extra monitor into the office. Somehow, as I was fiddling with it, I ended up disabling the automatic login and running of MythTV. I was at the point I knew I would reach eventually -- reinstalling and starting over. I really didn't want to open up the box to attach the CD-ROM drive again, though, so I endeavored to find a way to boot off a USB stick. The iMedia MythTV distro is only 68MB (give or take), and I had a 256MB USB key handy.
Just making a USB stick bootable is no easy task. I ended up going with HP's utility for making a boot key, which installed their custom Linux-based distro for upgrading certain servers' firmwares. Once I got that done, I copied the contents of the iMedia ISO to the key, renamed certain boot files as appropriate, and I was good to go.
The BIOS of the Jetway motherboard has as boot devices certain USB devices, like a USB floppy or USB ZIP drive. Following the suggestions I found on various web sites trying to deal with the problem of booting from USB keys, I tried all of those devices, but none worked. It turned out, though, when you set Hard Drive as the boot device and look under "Hard Drive Options" (or similar; I'm typing this from memory so I don't recall the exact text), one of the hard drives listed was in fact the very USB key from which I was trying to boot.
The only hiccup I had in booting from the key is the distro tried to mount /dev/cdrom to do the install; but even I knew enough to switch to another terminal, manually mount the key as /mnt/cdrom, and switch back and continue the process.
Yeah, I was feeling like pretty hot stuff at that point. I just booted and installed from a USB key.
The one thing that really concerns me is how hot this little box gets. It's not quite too hot to touch, but it does get close. Do I really want this thing in the same cabinet as two Xboxes (an original and a 360)?
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