[SOLVED] Acer Aspire One won’t boot Syslinux USB thumbdrive

Looks like my particular issue was the default partition size on my 16GB thumbdrive. Once I formatted the USB with a 2GB partition and installed Syslinux to that, it booted up right away where previously it would hang on the first “Syslinux Copyright Peter Anvin” message.

More details:

• Acer Aspire One model#: 722-C62bb (looks like this is an 11” model)
• Always handy to have another computer to work from (for web searching, trial and error formats on the USB drive, etc) when trying to fiddle with boot issues on another… my other computer is a Win8 desktop.
• Syslinux actually came into my picture because I was looking to create Comodo’s Rescue Disk. Comodo (v6.2) has a convenient point and click process to push their linux based rescue disk to a USB.
• I used diskpart (on my Win8 box) to create the smaller partition… here’s the core commands:
  • list vol (to get a feel for your windows drive letters and not format the wrong one :)
  • list disk (same for raw physical disks)
  • select disk X (MAKE SURE YOU CHOOSE THE RIGHT ONE!!)
  • (MAKE SURE AGAIN)
  • clean (THIS WIPES THE DISK!!!)
  • create part primary size=2048 (2GB worked for me in this context)
  • active
  • format fs=fat label=”COMODO” quick (I chose old school FAT filesystem looking for most downlevel compatibility, not sure if it was actually necessary vs FAT32. NTFS is notably the least compatible option for linux booting. Quick means do a quick format.)
• Then I just let Comodo do it’s thing and that result booted up right away for me – yay :)

Man Cave Bling - Beer Fridge - Koldfront 80 (BBR900BL) by EdgeStar

• First one was a dud out of the box. Just didn’t cool at all. EdgeStar support said it was missing coolant. Took them about 2 full weeks to turn around the replacement. They paid all replacement shipping via printed return label. It was a new serial number, not a repair of my old one, and it looked new.
• I am very satisfied now with this second unit and would definitely recommend it.
• The look is very nice. The glass is great. The blue light is great.
• The size is great, very deep. Fit my under-the-bar-cabinet-slot really well. A little shorter than the broken down old “Scotsman” that was in there but nothing a couple 2x4’s didn’t fix.
  • Sure am glad to have found something in a more reasonable price range… I’m sure the Scotsman stuff must last forever but at upwards of $2k, not on my kids’ college budget :)
• Cooling has been spot on for the 2 months I’ve had it so far <knock wood>.
• The cheapest I was able to find it was from “Ideal Wine Coolers” for $400. Half retail and $100 less than Amazon.
• Other considerations for this same general form factor are the:
  • “EdgeStar 80” (CBR901SG) for $500 if you’re interested in the stainless steel look, and the
  • “EdgeStar 84” (OBR900SS) for $750 if you want outdoor certified cooling capability… they indicate that a unit should be specifically designed to run outdoors or it will burn itself out quickly running non stop… that one would look great next to a hot tub :)