Panic! At the Kernel

When I built my HTPC I made a big mistake. I bought an MSI P965 motherboard that utilizes a jmicron pata controller, whoops. This controller first gave me problems when I built the computer and my dvd player was all choppy on dvd playback and I discovered that I needed to install a specific driver for the the motherboard (and the mobo documentation didn’t mention it at all). Now the controller is pissing me off because there doesn’t seem to be any support for it in Linux and it gives me the greatest error I have ever seen “Kernel Panic”. So if I want to install linux on my htpc (so I can run Mythtv) I have to buy a sata dvd player (okay, I’m interested) or boot off a usb drive. I think I’m going to try booting off a usb drive, I haven’t tried that before, sounds fun.

I found out that Gparted has a liveusb distribution. I used gparted in the past to partition the drive on my laptop (read, break my laptop) so I have so experience on how not to use it. Then I read the documentation on the liveusb software, the documentation was priceless and so vary sparse that I’ll reprint it all here.

To use the LiveUSB follow these simple instuctions:

(1) Create a fat16 partition on the usb stick and make sure it’s flagged “boot”.

(2) Unzip the gparted-liveusb-x.x.x-x.zip to your home folder or anywhere you like.

(3) Copy the CONTENTS of the gparted-liveusb-0.x.x-x folder to the fat16 partition you just created (sda1?).

(4) UMOUNT the usb stick and execute this command:

syslinux -s /dev/sda1

That is it, that is all the direction on how to use the software. I don’t know how to create a fat16 partition on my usbdrive, but I’m sure that I can figure that much out, the step that kills me is number 4. Execute this command? Execute it where? WHERE? Canada? Linuxland? I’m on XP and that command looks completely foregin to a complete linux noob like myself. It seems to me that someone using a live gparted distrobution is probably not using linux or else they would probably use the regular gparted program. Hopefully all will end well, I’ve been reading a thread at the gparted forum and I should be able to figure it out. If it’s this difficult to get a partition, I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like to dual boot to mythtv.

-Josh