grub usb booting problem

Forum: USB booting
Topic: grub usb booting problem
started by: kavlax

Posted by kavlax on July 07 2006,17:22

Here's what I did:

installed grub onto my usb stick after making one whole disk partition in fat16
mounted the dsl iso and coppied it's contents to a directory on the usb stick - /boot/dsl
edited the menu.lst myself with info I dug up on the web - /boot/grub/menu.lst

Right now it does boots into a working dsl environment, but there's a small problem. When I try to mount the stick to save anything on it I'm told that it's already mounted. Apparently it's mounted on /cdrom, and as you know that's made read only. Plus I can't unmount it because it says it's in use. I'm thinking to fix this problem I would have to give it some different boot parameters, but I never see the boot splash when I boot from grub. I'm pritty sure I can just type them into the menu.lst file, but I don't know what to put there. Could somone who knows how this works please help me out?

Here is the dsl section of my menu.lst:

root (hd0,0)

title Damn Small Linux 3.0.1 (working)
kernel /boot/dsl/boot/isolinux/linux24 dsl root=sda1/boot/dsl knoppix_dir=/boot/dsl/knoppix knoppix_name=knoppix toram
initrd /boot/dsl/boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
boot

Posted by ~thc on July 08 2006,10:00

you may try "frugal" as an additional kernel parameter.

Posted by kavlax on July 10 2006,06:12

no that didn't do it, it's still mounting the flash drive to /cdrom.

I think I need to know is what isolinux does under the usbflash dsl installation and figure out how to do that under grub.

Now how do I do that??

Posted by kerry on July 10 2006,07:34

sounds like you did a poor man's install on the usb and your trying to run a linux system on fat16 which is not good. you've basically copied the cd to usb so it's running like the cd.

i can only guess the problems your going to have. DSL has several install options for usb, why not use whats there. i've heard you should not run linux on a fat file system due to lack of permissions, something like that. a ext2 or ext3 is the preferred file system. any how it's your hardware so do as you please, i can only reccommend you read the getting started guide in dillo. good luck

Posted by kavlax on July 10 2006,21:18

When I use those very tools you spoke of they create a 50MB FAT16 partition on the flash drive for the dsl system. Not to mention, as I'm running the system from memory with the 'toram' option, so that shouldn't matter anyway. The only thing I want to do is run dsl in exactly the fasion that it runs when installed with those scripts just use grub as a loader instead of isolinux, which is used from the cd, or syslinux, which is used for the usbflash install. Then I can boot several systems from the same usb stick. The only problem is I don't know how to convert what's in the isolinux and syslinux scripts into the commands I need in the grub menu.lst to boot properly.

I know there's got to be a way to make this work. I'm just not smart enough to figure it out myself yet, which is why I'm trying to see if anyone on here knows how to do it already.

Posted by kerry on July 10 2006,21:39

Frugal install does that very thing. you should see boot,knoppix,lost&found...
boot is grub where the menu.lst is, that is where you add other systems or change the boot parameters.knoppix is the image that's still compressed just like on the cd.