Easiest way to install on usb?

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Easiest way to install on usb?
started by: amadis

Posted by amadis on June 04 2006,19:20

I use dsl on live cd and hd installation and think it's just great. So I decided to install it on usb pen drive (kingston 1GB).

I've trying to install it. I followed the procedure described in:
< http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/USB_Booting >

But I could not achive my pc to boot from usb. The bios has the option to boot from usb devices...

Does anybody knows if that procedure is correct? I'd like to know where I can find the procedure to install on usb pendrive loading the live cd version, not from windows.

Regards,
Matías

Posted by ZoOp on June 04 2006,19:56

a lots of posts in the forum can help you in that thing. Just type in the search usb and install, you should get a lot of results on that point.
yours
z

Posted by cbagger01 on June 05 2006,04:15

FYI,

Sometimes a USB device will not boot unless:

1) Quick Boot or Fast Boot is DISABLED in the BIOS
2) USB Keyboard emulation is ENABLED in the BIOS
3) The USB ports at the rear of the computer are used.

Posted by dougz on June 05 2006,14:27

Quote

Sometimes a USB device will not boot unless:

1) Quick Boot or Fast Boot is DISABLED in the BIOS
2) USB Keyboard emulation is ENABLED in the BIOS
3) The USB ports at the rear of the computer are used.

Interesting. I'll have to try #2 to see whether it helps my DSL-N boot problem (no problem with DSL).

#3 is a very good point. My BIOS does not enable the USB ports that serve the front-panel connectors. Matter of fact, neither do many versions of Linux although Windows XP (yuck!) does.

The usbtree script can be very helpful in mapping your usb --

Quote

[dougz@fedora USB Stuff]$ perl usbtree.pl
/: Bus 04.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=uhci_hcd/2p, 12M
/: Bus 03.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=uhci_hcd/2p, 12M
/: Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=uhci_hcd/2p, 12M
/: Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=ehci_hcd/6p, 480M
|__ Port 4: Dev 2, If 0, Class=stor., Driver=usb-storage, 480M

< Download the usbtree script >

Posted by cbagger01 on June 05 2006,17:27

FYI,

If you own a major brand PC like HP or Dell, a good way to test USB boot ability/settings is to do this:

1) Download the latest BIOS from manufacturer and update your PC.
2) Download the company's bootable USB drive utility (a MS Windows program). Dell has one and HP has one. They should create a "bootable" USB key that works with their BIOSes.
3) Follow above advice.
4) If you can get booting to work with "their" formatted drives, then you can reasonably assume that you can try 3rd party bootable USB devices like DSL - USB for example.

Posted by amadis on June 05 2006,18:43

Thanks for the advices!

I've saved the image to sda, and as I imagine that my clone PC is quite old to boot straight from usb I started using a floppy-usb for booting... That way seems to be running dsl from usb pen drive.

But I found the following problem: when I download some files, for example to install JRE the next tiem I reboot I lost my files!
May be I'm not understanding the dsl usb "phylosophy"...? Or am I doing something wrong? It is possible to run dsl from a pen drive as if it were in a hd?

Too many questions... I'm starting to enjoy dsl!

Regards,
Matías

Posted by cbagger01 on June 06 2006,21:42

Open emelfm as Super User

Copy your extension files over from /tmp to /cdrom

Should persist after reboot.

Posted by amadis on June 07 2006,17:49

Thanks a lot! That way the file persists.
Any software, for example, jre should be installed inside /cdrom?