USB booting :: 4 GB USB stick and FAT16/32



Hi

I'm going to buy a USB-stick to use with DSL, and I'm wondering if I should choose a 2 or 4 GB-stick.

It seems that DSL uses the FAT16-system, which has a maximum size of 2 GB.

Is it possible to have two FAT16-partitions on a 4 GB USB-stick, and both read/writable by DSL?
If not, will both or one of them be readable by Windows?

Someone wrote that it's possible to use the FAT32-filesystem..
Is this correct?

regards
Magnus

Hello Jagan!

I'm using FAT32 on a sandisk titanium cruzer 2GB with DSL installed embedded style as I'm posting this.

Have fun,
meo

Hi meo

How did you fix that? I've read that DSL originally only supports FAT16 (with syslinux as loader). Did you use GRUB?
You say you installed it "embedded". Is this the same as "frugal"?

regards
Magnus

The embedded install is possibly the best solution as it gives the best of both worlds, though I am not sure it is always capable of booting from usb natively.
If you buy a larger memory stick ( ihave just seen a 16GB for £125) you can and you should partition it.

Hello again Jagan (or is it Magnus; sounds swedish)!

If you want to use dsl as embedded the first thing to do is to download the dsl-something-embedded.zip. After that I usually unzip the file to a directory and copy the content to the usb pendrive (preformatted to FAT32). My computer ( a 5+ years old laptop) can't boot directly from an usb-drive so I use a cd to start with a cheatcode  something like: dsl fromhd=/dev/sda1 qemu frugal (and it's possible to add others to; I use noswap also so I can spin down the harddrive and get a quiet environment) and after that it boots up normally. If you use dsl-embedded you'll get a directory called qemu containing among other files a 60 MB virtual harddrive (called harddisk) that mounts as hdb when booting. Well that 's just about it I think.

Have fun,
meo

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