Question OS error on an old pc

[kerangovender]

i have a 16gb usb 2.0 flash drive and and i partitioned it like this : 1st volume is 10GB and the remaining space amounts to +-5gb. I am using the 10gb as a storage device and the rest for by bootable linux mint os. i have both 32bit and 64bit versions of linux mint 19.1 cinnamon and im not sure which one to use because i cant get the 32bit to boot on my old pc - i get this:

Booting 'Boot linuxmint-19.1-cinnamon-32bit'

(hd0,1)
f "%check%"=="0x00" partnew (hd0,3) 0 0 0

Error 29http://grub4dos.chenall.net/e/29)
Disk write error

Press any key to continue. . .

The volume is formatted as NTFS

Now it is fat32 and this is what happened:

after +-5mins it boots to desktop and error message says : Cinnamon just crashed. You are currently running in fallback mode. i pressed the restart cinnamon button but error persists. I click no and open system monitor:

CPU 100% _ very old pentium 4
RAM 43% used Max is 1.5GB

it reads all the drives that are installed : 2x40gb hdd, floppy drive, cd drive.

Then i installed Ubuntu MATE i386 18.04.2 and everything worked but slow as i expected. Cant really get much out of a northwood pentium 4.

Can someone please explain whats happening with linux mint?

Thanks

 

[MU_Engineer]

A P4 Northwood is a 32 bit only CPU, so you cannot use a 64 bit OS on that CPU. All x86 based OSes boot in 16 bit "real mode" and then later in the boot sequence progress into the final processor running mode (32 bit protected mode, 64 bit long mode.) If you try to boot a 64 bit OS, the BIOS will hand off booting to the OS, and then the OS will spit out an error and halt when an unsupported (illegal) instruction is called. This happens with all x86 OSes, so if you can boot the OS, you are running the correct version.

A disk write error is separate from an illegal instruction and will throw a much different error. Memory cards were formatted at FAT16 until they exceeded 2 GB in size, in which case they were generally formatted as exFAT. FAT32 was not generally used on memory cards, even though it would have worked. exFAT can be supported under Linux but support is generally not built in by default (as it is a proprietary Microsoft product) and you generally have to install exfat-utils or your distribution's equivalent to read/write those volumes. exFAT is not NTFS but a Linux OS that can't recognize exFAT because support is not built in may confuse the two as both are proprietary MS FSes.

Newer Ubuntu versions generally install support for exFAT by default so you can typically read memory cards with that OS without any additional actions.

 

[kerangovender]

Okay thanks.
It there a way to have both 64bit and 32bit and have them to switch to 32 bit if it detects a 32bit CPU and switch to 64 if it detects a 64bit CPU and have them write to the same rw file but if it's 32bit then the 64bit programs are not visible?

 

[AllanGH]

At this stage of the game, no bootloader is equipped to do CPU detection and chain OS loading dependent upon the findings. That would be a manual selection on your part.

The other issue is formatting the USB flash drive as NTFS. Most distros load NTFS support after initialization.

IIRC, though, most Debian-based distros should be able to boot from an ext4 partition, so you would be better-off formatting your Flash drive as ext4.

 

[kerangovender]

I have tested this on NTFS and Fat32 with both 32 and 64 bit variants, and it works completely fine on my other pc (i3 2130 + 8gb ram). The P4 cpu is an i386 cpu and i know it is only supports 32bit but it wont load an OS from NTFS on a USB Flash drive

 

[Alabalcho]

IIRC, though, most Debian-based distros should be able to boot from an ext4 partition, so you would be better-off formatting your Flash drive as ext4.

The P4 cpu is an i386 cpu and i know it is only supports 32bit but it wont load an OS from NTFS on a USB Flash drive

It's the BIOS who needs to boot off USB, so your USB should be formatted FAT32 (or have FAT32 bootable partition, with rest EXT4/NTFS)

 

[AllanGH]

You're correct, of course....the /boot partition would be fat32, and the / partition would then be the ext4 filesystem.

I, for some weird reason was thinking more of FS access while typing booting.