Alternatives to the pendrive?
Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Alternatives to the pendrive?
started by: Nikosapi
Posted by Nikosapi on July 09 2005,05:30
I just tried DSL for the first time (right after I went and bought one of those buisness card cds 
) and I LOVE it!!The only problem is that I can't get DSL to boot off of a pendrive, I'm guessing because I'm using an mp3 player as a pendrive. So, I was wondering if there is a quick way to get DSL to mount my mp3 player while it's booting and make it look like hard disk so I can save files to it and save my settings, etc...
Or, could I install DSL on the mp3 player and use the cd as a way to load the appropriate drivers for the mp3 player?
Thanks,
-->Nikosapi
Posted by cbagger01 on July 09 2005,11:16
If your mp3 player is supported as a Standard USB Mass Storage device, then it can be used in DSL.Boot up with the player already plugged into your USB port.
Then open emelfm file manager.
Then go to /mnt directory.
Then Right-click on sda1 and choose "Mount" from the menu.
You should be able to load/save files to your device.
When finished, go back to the /mnt directory.
Right-click on sda1 again and choose "Unmount" from the menu.
When your device's LED stops blinking, it is now safe to unplug your device.
Posted by Nikosapi on July 09 2005,14:41
Yes, I understand how to mount my mp3 player, I use it all the time with my mandrake boxes. I was wondering if it would be possible to have DSL installed on my mp3 player and use a bootable cd to load some usb drivers or something like that, so it works off of the mp3 player and not the cd...-->Nikosapi
Posted by cbagger01 on July 10 2005,11:12
You can boot it natively if you run the install to pendrive script and your BIOS can boot a usb device.However, before you do anything, you should write down your mp3 player's native filesystem format (usually it is FAT) and maybe even make a backup copy of the entire device to a file on your hard drive.
(make sure mp3 player is unmounted)
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/hda1/mp3_backup.img
and to restore:
sudo dd if=/mnt/hda1/mp3_backup.img /dev/sda
Now for the rest of the story...
Once you have your player backed up, you can either do the install to pendrive script which wipes your device and reformats it, or you can download the dsl-embedded version and unzip the contents to your mp3 player and then download syslinux and apply syslinux to your mp3 player's data partition.
Finally, you could just manually copy the /knoppix/knoppix file from your livecd over to you mp3 player and then use either the livecd or the usb boot floppy for the initial bootup phase.
Posted by Nikosapi on July 10 2005,17:24
Thanks, Sadly I learnt about the backup the hard way. I ended up spending 2 hours getting the mp3 player to work again. So, I think that I'm going to go buy a usb key. Thank you,
-->Nikosapi