On Sat, Apr 05, 2014 at 09:22:25AM -0400, Paul Bourgeois wrote:
> I get two or three empty lines, and an unresponsive cursor when I boot
> from the USB drive.
Are the required drivers loaded? Some distros ship the PS/2 drivers
(i8042) and USB drivers as kernel modules; they don't compile them in.
Ensure they get loaded.
> Gparted tells me its fine,
No. It tells you what it can see from the partition table. It doesn't do
an integrity check of the filesystems, the boot code, etc.
> but I'm suspicious that some part of the boot sector or other critical
> start of drive location is corrupted.
If the checksums given by the following…
sha1sum <(dd if=/path/to/dev bs=440 count=1) \
<(dd if=/path/to/boot/sector/image bs=440 count=1)
don't match, then the image is corrupted, unless it's one of those
bootloaders than have variable data, such as some variants of EXTLINUX,
in which case you'll have to omit the given sector from the checksum
computation.
As for anything on the filesystem, that's bootloader-specific. You could
try checksumming all the files of interest and comparing to the checksum
of the original files in the package.
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