Creating USB stick with DSL without booting from C

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Creating USB stick with DSL without booting from C
started by: Bram Dumolin

Posted by Bram Dumolin on July 27 2005,12:34

Hi,

I just browsed around the forum a bit and I saw many times the same problems being posted without any real answers.

My question is this:

How can you install DSL on a USB stick _without_ booting with a CD, but just dd'ing something to the stick and making it bootable if necessary?

I thought this was the idea of DSL and the "pen" installs.

Secondly, what's all this about bootusb images when they don't exist any longer under their respective names?

Is there no sticky FAQ somewhere where you can just follow the steps and have a working system?

It can basically go along the lines of this:

From Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD:

(We assume you have a computer which can boot from USB otherwise follow the CD or floppy howto).

1) Get image from <list of mirrors> with name dsl-everything.img

2) Put your stick in the usb port

3) dmesg to see what device your usb is mapped to

Assuming /dev/sda

4) dd if=dsl-everything.img of=/dev/sda

5) Reboot your computer or remove stick and plug it in other computer, boot other computer

6) Success!

From Windows:

<fill in the procedure>

From Mac:

<fill in the procedure>

---

I don't understand what the whole thing is, but then I'm new to this so I probably don't have a clue.

I ended up trying featherlinux, which is not supported anymore, so back to DSL and finally gave up because I already spent an hour waning through all the unfinished posts on this forum.

I suggest to the moderators to make this sticky once the correct procedure has been published.

That way people looking for information can actually find it without running away screaming.

Thanks,
Bram

Posted by Your Fuzzy God on July 27 2005,15:44

I am assuming you are running Window$ and just want to boot to dsl when the pendrive is inserted?

To the best of my knowledge you would have to replace the Window$ boot manager with either lilo or grub (a Linux boot manager) since they can load both Window$ and Linux. Then you would have to choose which OS you want when booting. However, you would have to choose every time, whether the USB stick is in or not.

I have never done this since all of my Linux comps are Linux only.

Hopefully this helps a little,

-Cody
< Mainframe Computers >

Posted by Caspar_s on July 28 2005,18:14

No, he wants the usb key itself to be bootable - so if the computer boots with the usb key (and the computer is set to boot from usb) in, it will go to linux instead of whatever is on the drive.

I can't remember how I installed mine... My wife has our cd drives, so I didn't boot - have you tried running the embedded version and installing to usb key from the menu?

As to your question with the disk image - the problem with that is the disk size. Unless you force people to have one partition of 50mb and the rest of the key as another, I think you'd need different images for 64, 128, 256 etc.

I know the drive geometry was what I had trouble with - but once I had adjusted it, it was fine.

Posted by Bram Dumolin on July 28 2005,20:21

[quote=Caspar_s,July 28 2005,14:14][/quote]
re,

Quote

No, he wants the usb key itself to be bootable - so if the computer boots with the usb key (and the computer is set to boot from usb) in, it will go to linux instead of whatever is on the drive.

Exactly.

Quote

I can't remember how I installed mine... My wife has our cd drives, so I didn't boot - have you tried running the embedded version and installing to usb key from the menu?

No I didn't boot from the CD image as I think it's a bit too much work to first write a CD, boot from it, and then have a menu item to install something which should be possible with one command line.

Can someone please give me the command line that's used in the script which is run by the menu item I keep hearing about?
Or attach the script or something.

Otherwise I have to mount the cloop image and I don't have the cloop module installed yet.

Quote

As to your question with the disk image - the problem with that is the disk size. Unless you force people to have one partition of 50mb and the rest of the key as another, I think you'd need different images for 64, 128, 256 etc.

I know the drive geometry was what I had trouble with - but once I had adjusted it, it was fine.

Drive geometry might be an issue but if you do something along the lines of the following, it should work I think.

DSL creates an image on a pendrive, let's say following partitions:

/dev/sda1 50MB
/dev/sda2 78MB

dd if=/dev/sda of=blah

cut the other partition from the file or make it empty or whatever, null the partition and compress the resulting image.

Then you would have a bootable image which you can just dd to the stick if I'm not mistaken?

Thanks,
Bram