Comments on: USB booting the kogan agora – is 2GB too big?

By: ShaneT

ShaneT — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:22:13 +0000

This might help.
I recently bought an Agora Pro, dumped Gos and installed WIN7 via USB.
The USB stick I was using was 16Gb.
The key to it is Fat32.
If you go to this link, http://pingdennis.com/windows/installing-windows-7-using-a-usb-stick/
It explains how to use the diskpart utlity. It has all the instructions for creating a bootable USB stick. The trick is using the Diskpart utility from Vista or Win7. On earlier versions the Diskpart utility does not recognise a USB stick.

By: JimT

JimT — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:48:24 +0000

More findings, in case it helps someone.
My 8GB Toshiba stick *will* boot the Agora Pro with Windows 98 (command line) installed with the HP USB Disk Format tool.
But so far, I get a ‘boot error’ with any linux image I try on that stick. When I tried running syslunx on the working Win98 image the Agora then refused to boot from it. (btw, all the tested images will boot my Dell)

By: JimT

JimT — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 05:25:33 +0000

Ive been unable to boot gparted-live from an 8GB Toshiba USB stick. The same stick will boot my Dell D610.. It seems like the Kogan does indeed have a problem with some USB mem sticks.

By: Liam

Liam — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:42:27 +0000

Thanks for all the great info on the site Kayno.
Anyways, I tried Ubuntu with a 8GB drive – no luck. 1GB drive – works first time.

Keep up the good work

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 14 May 2009 09:13:12 +0000

Same problem ‘Boot Error’ on a 4G stick. Changed to a 1G and away she went.

By: kayno

kayno — Sun, 10 May 2009 08:59:22 +0000

I am guessing the issue is FAT16 vs FAT32.

Anita – how did you go with booting the agora using the instructions in the kogan manual? did you try a live boot and see if the touchpad worked?

By: Anita

Anita — Sun, 10 May 2009 04:30:11 +0000

I had no problem with a 4GB USB flash drive to make it bootable and followed the instructions in the Kogan manual

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:39:02 +0000

my 2 gig corsair usb drive has worked properly for booting…

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:52:58 +0000

I was able to install UNR using a 16gb sandisk cruzer contour. I did have issues with formatting the drive properly. Apparently only an older version of the HP formatting tool works. There are some nice tips here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=USB_Flash_Drive_Preparation