I've followed Hexxeh's instructions (see links) on how to get his build onto a USB thumb drive, but I get the error, "missing operating system" upon booting from it.

I've tried flagging it "boot" in gparted, unncompressing the .tar.gr it multiple times (in case of corruption), using multiple, brand-new thumb drives, using UNetbootin, etc, etc.

It's a .img file, and I know it's worked for others with the same hardware (apart from USB thumb stick brand).

Are some thumb drives just not bootable?

Any advice highly appreciated.

Links:
http://carbon.hexxeh.net/chromiumos/
http://carbon.hexxeh.net/chromiumos/linux.txt
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/downloa...real-computer/

And you did "dd" it onto the USB right?

Have you looked to see whats on the USB?

Yepp, that's what I did. I cannot browse to the USB drive, but opening up gparted shows it as "unknown" filesystem. I also tried dcfldd.

Today I also tried downloading the file again, but the result is the same.

Here's proof that it should work on my netbook just fine:

http://digiex.net/computer-discussio...-msi-wind.html

I would suggest you imitate whats going on in regards to dd'ing the .img to USB
Meaning; mount the .img file and copy its contents to your USB in lieu of actually doing the dd process

I dont prefer to dd my usb just to test a distro, so I mount the .img and copy it to a folder(to check it out)
or directly to USB.

I'm assuming Chromium OS is a Debian based system or no??

For example; earlier I downloaded UNR (ubuntu-netbook-remix), which is a .img file made to be dd'd
to USB

Because I often test distro's from my 2 usb's, I dont want to dd anything
as I will have to reformat it later

So, I mount the .img file and copy to folder or usb:
cd into the folder wherever the .img is
assuming its on Desktop, and folder name is "newusb"
become root too:

for me, UNR.img is in the newusb folder
so gotta make a folder to mount the .img on, any name is good
I'll use "mnt"
and a folder to copy the contents of .img file to
I'll name that folder "copy"
Now mount the .img file on "mnt" folder
and copy to "copy" folder
there may be a hidden file/folder in there too so make sure to copy any of those too
Now, unmount the folder mnt and see whats in the "copy" folder
Your USB needs to be reformatted
and fixed before you do anything

Please see this post littlegreywings
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...please-772014/

Thanks a lot for your reply, but I get the message

I've tried adding "-t ntfs", "ext3" and "ext2", but no joy.

I got it
read the final post in that other thread

I also just installed chromiumos.img to a qemu-img
and am trying to get it to boot...

You want portable-qemu to check it out?

Hi, thanks again for your help.

I followed your instructions and mounted the 2 partitions. I created two partitions on my usb, one ext3 and one ntfs. I moved the files from the on mounted partition to the ext3 partition on my USB drive and gave it the boot flag in gparted. But when I boot from it it still says missing operating system. Are the other two partitions needed?

Also, I'd still like to know why the dd method works for everyone but me.

As for the qemu, I'm not really sure what the has to do with this, but thanks.

The problem was that I did

instead of