Comments on: Installing Linux on USB – Part 6: Create a DOS and Linux bootable USB flash drive

By: jake

jake — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:56:37 +0000

You may wish to mention the occasional need to use the undocumented /mbr switch when fdisking the flash drive. If there’s crud on the master boot record, something can’t grok the boot block and the boot process will die with NON-System disk or somesuch.

–jake

By: Scott Charles

Scott Charles — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:26:37 +0000

Haider: appreciate your reply. And the hak5.org is a good reference. Doesn’t quite help me, but thanks anyway. What I’m trying to do is install Linux on a USB flash drive, as Kushal has outlined. I’m just trying to figure out how to do it in Kubuntu.

FYI I just tried the cfdisk command on one of my extra flashdrives, got an error saying the drive was read only. No doubt simple to fix if you know Linux, but if you don’t, it’s a brick wall.

Thanks,
Scott

By: Haider

Haider — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:36:27 +0000

^^ Here is the ultimate usb booting thread
http://hak5.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=14179

By: Scott Charles

Scott Charles — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:02:52 +0000

Kushal: your “Installing Linux on USB” is great, the best I’ve seen. I’ve been looking around for quite a while, trying to find some insight on how to get Linux on a USB flashdrive (I’m running a brand new diskless dual-core Atom small form factor PC). And I’m a new Linux user by the way.

I am able to get Kubuntu on a flashdrive using the USB wizard, but it appears to be an ISO (e.g, CD image), not the individual files. What I end up with is one great big 3gb file — persistent, but a bit slow, and if it crashes you lose your settings (which happened to me). But up to know that method is the only one I saw (all the tutorials seem to be all about getting a CD image on a flashdrive).

Your method appears to actually install the individual files. I have two questions: would your method as outlined in Part 5 and Part 6 work for Kunbuntu? Or am I missing the point of your tutorial?

Second question: in part 6, you give instructions for creating DOS 6 on a flashdrive (coincidentally something else that I need!). However I don’t have a floppy drive. I have 2 machines, one running windows, one running Linux (the Atom). No floppy. Is there another way to get the image you supplied on to the flash drive?

By the way your comments about life-span of USB flashdrives is well taken, thanks!

Many Thanks and Best Regards,
Scott Charles
PlumbBob Research

By: Kenny

Kenny — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:43:55 +0000

I use a USB jump drive to act as the primary boot device for all my systems. Most computer manufacturers are reluctant to recommend installing grub to their systems because it interferes with their system recovery option. So I have grub installed on the jump drive with a full working distro ( I use Ubuntu). I use Bios setup to select USB flash as the first boot device and then grub boots allowing me to select the windows or linux distribution on the hard drive. The advantage is that the primary windows partition on the PCs primary hard drive does not have to be altered with grub.

I find that I can even run compiz quite well on the USB. It means that we can leave the SYSTEMS ALONE.

By: haider_up32

haider_up32 — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:51:03 +0000

there can only be three primary partitions and an extended partition

By: Bean Counter

Bean Counter — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:40:18 +0000

The second instance is for booting into runlevel 1, or single mode, a minimal single-user shell, generally for rescue purposes.

By: Review: Installing Linux on USB flash drives and USB hard drives | Organizing Linux information!

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:03:06 +0000

[...] Part 6 [...]

By: nikhil

nikhil — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:29:20 +0000

i wasn’t able to get the size down to 18 mb
it was about 100 mb.
but i got it to work
perhaps you can tell me exactly how you made it so small

By: Xaero

Xaero — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:19:57 +0000

Oh you have not mentioned the bzipping step, I was thinking that you missed the bunzipping. I was wondering if by any chance you knew why do some distros that use squashfs keep searching for cdroms. It causes a problem when installing from USB drives.

Secondly if you install grub on a usb disk and copy lets say a fedora image that has a folder named isolinux with the boot related files and LiveOS with the squashfs image, how do you point the kernel to use the squashfs image, because the original isolinux.cfg/syslinux.cfg doesn’t have any path mentioned, how does the kernel find it?

By: Kushal

Kushal — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:30:55 +0000

Hi Xaero,
Thank you for your comment! I don’t think any step is missing. The “tar” commands does the unzipping part and then you make changes to the menu.lst file and you should be able to boot from your device.
It is not possible to boot directly from the bzipped image – at least I am not aware of any method.
Are you failing at any step?

By: Xaero

Xaero — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:11:47 +0000

I was just wondering if you missed out bunzipping after this in Step 4:
debian:~# mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt/
debian:~# cd /mnt
debian:/mnt# tar -xjvf /root/debian-lenny-fresh-install.tar.bz2

’cause you seem to use this in Step 6:
debian:~# mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt
debian:~# nano /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst

Or is it possible to boot from a bizipped image?

By: nikhil

nikhil — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:19:07 +0000

so now i’ve copied all the directories as suggested by Nx and installed grub. let me give it a try to see if it works.

By: Nx

Nx — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:44:10 +0000

Rescue usb created : 18mb!
Copy top level dirs ,full copy of /boot,/bin. Add /etc/fstab, /sbin/reboot, for each binary use ldd to figure out libs needed to be copied.Around 150 files to have a basic system.

By: Nx

Nx — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:20:50 +0000

you can usé debootstrap(available in debian and maybe ubuntu) to install a minimal system in a directory(~100mb)+xfce or maybe dsl(damn small linux), puppy,etc..

Great article, very nice to read!
Ps:there is a duplicate in the last fstab