USB booting :: 5 way usb problem



First off I must say your DSL is pretty damn cool. I bought a 512 usb stick and I want a setup for recovery situations and the virtual machine in windows. Im assuming the 5 way means that the stick is both bootable and can run the windows emulator. Thats where i want to be. If thats not possible just say so and I will give up on this. First off one thing you should know is I have one of those new U3 type sticks. This shows up in windows as 2 drives. A very tiny drive with the U3 launcher and a second drive for storage. Before you say all bets are off and its not possible you should know a couple of things.
1. I have successfully created a bootable stick by running from cd and using the install to usb tool. This works fine.
2. I have successfully created the embeded install and it runs in windows just fine.
What im trying to do is have it bootable and be able to run in windows. I assume this is the 5 way script so I booted from cd and downloaded the 5way script to ramdisk and opened the shell and ran it. here is where I get stuck.


DSL USB pendrive 5-way installation utility.
No responsibility for data loss or hardware damage!
Your pendrive must have a vfat partition visibile to DSL.
This usually means 32 sector/track and not more than 1024 cyclinders.
Use cfdisk to accomplish this task. (See readme.txt)
DO NOT have your pendrive mounted.
Ready to proceed (y/..)? y
Standby fetching the embedded zip file...
Connecting to www.ibiblio.org[152.2.210.80]:21
dsl-embedded.zip     100% |*****************************| 51358 KB    00:00 ETA
Enter the target device to hold image (EXAMPLE: sda1): sda1
Last change to exit before destroying all data on /dev/sda1
Continue (y/..)? y

Formatting /dev/sda1
umount: /mnt/sda1 is not mounted (according to mtab)
mkdosfs 2.9 (15 May 2003)
/dev/sda1: Permission denied
Error creating DOS filesystem.
Hmm...

maybe you are not running the script as the "root" or superuser?

Try typing:

sudo su

and then run the script again.
I probably should deprecate this script.
[edit] I have now deprecated this script.[/edit]

5-way is pretty much obsolete as it only tries USB-ZIP install, 32 sectors per track and up to 1024 cyclinders.
Made back in the olden days of 64MB and 128MB pendrives.

If you already have dsl-embedded working on your 512MB pendrive, and if your computer's bios supports USB booting then I would try it as is. Usually it should work.

It it does not boot natively from your computer then I would try to apply syslinux boot loader to the pendrive, or even a thrid party or manufacture's boot utility.

Trying to apply a USB-ZIP style install to a 512MB pendrive is most likely not to be what you want and will most likely fail in trying to change the drives geometry.

With dsl-embedded, I do not recommend doing anything to the pendrive except to unzip the archive onto it.

OK. Thank you. I got it working. Booting from usb as well as running  in windows was as simple as extracting the embeded zip file to the drive.
Glad to hear this, as that is what we now recommend.
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