Help making a USB-ZIP boot

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Help making a USB-ZIP boot
started by: Tenks

Posted by Tenks on May 18 2006,03:04

I'm very new to linux, and wanna try it out without making a partition on my HD, so I decided to put it on my USB drive.

(I know I can make a CD boot, but I carry my usb drive with me everywhere)

I've tried doing a lot of research on installing DSL on the usb for booting, but I found out that my computer doesn't allow USBHDD booting.

Now I want to try USB-ZIP booting, but cannot find a tutorial that makes any sense.

Can someone give me directions on how do make a USB-ZIP drive for a newbie, or point me in the direction to a tutorial?

(sorry if my vocab is bad... I'm a newbie)

Posted by humpty on May 18 2006,05:22

Follow this link;
< http://petepr.hopto.org/dsl/guides.htm#Boot_Pen >

Bear in mind this is just my experience and is not official or anything.

Posted by Tenks on May 18 2006,05:49

Thanks for the info. It answered a few questions I had...

But I still have a problem. I'm following the instructions in the link and for the target device, I put in sda and it didn't work. I don't know if linux is not reading my pen drive (it blinks when I plug it in as if it's being read) or if it is something different then sda...

I tried using "dmesg | grep scsi -A 3" in the terminal to find out what device it's on, but it came up with a bunch of numbers and nothing that looked like sda.

So basically, how do I find out what device my pendrive (it's a PNY Attache) is on?

Another thing: Does linux have something like Windows' Explorer where I can view the files of my pendrive?

Posted by humpty on May 18 2006,09:31

Try this;
open a terminal (Aterm) and type;
sudo su
sfdisk -l /dev/sda
and see what it says

>..it didn't work
how far does it get? if it's a geometry problem, you'll have to search
furthur into this forum.

>Does linux have something like Windows' Explorer where I can view
> the files of my pendrive?
EmelFM is a file manager, it's icon looks like a drawer/filing cabinet (much like win3.1)

Posted by Tenks on May 19 2006,03:50

Thx for all the help, I think I have everything set straight. Now I have questions that aren't usb booting related so I guess that's for another topic, lol.