Talk:Installing to a USB Flash Drive
From DSL Wiki
"I am assuming that this is supposed to be a how-to and aimed at those with some to little experence with linux and perhaps NO experence with DSL, If this assumption is incorrect I apoligize. My comments are also based on my experences with the 3.3 release. I do have experence with Redhat and SuSE but have never used DSL before, I have never used a wiki or contributed before either so, If I am being rude or too chatty I also apoligize for that.
I have edited the page to point out the existing tools that work.
I will be working on figuring out the manual process & updating this page as needed. These are now my notes. First, Mention that being root is needed and that there is no root password, you have to sudo sh or sudo bash, (That was a pain to find).
Next, using -- locate mbr.bin -- results in the message :locate Command not found. However -- find mbr.bin -- DOES work.
Next, Create a FAT16 or FAT32 partition on the pendrive: mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdX1
Does NOT work as mkfs.vfat does not exist in 3.3,
-- So, having given up on that method for the moment, --- In the section From within Linux using GRUB as boot loader
First you might want to mention the partition type as listed in fdisk or whatever tool you are recommending.
Then the command grub-install --root-directory=. /dev/<device> does not work , it says --no-floppy is an unrecoginized option. deleting it then causes grub to probe and fail with a not found or not a block device.
This is a little unclear,
From within Linux
* Download the dsl-embedded zipfile
But form within windows, you're just saying DSL, but it is unclear which one ..
Also, on linux, you said to format in FAT16, and in windows in FAT 32 ...
Contents |
mbr
I'm not 100% sure that this was what did the trick, but after having some trouble with this I ran the command
install-mbr /dev/sda
and that seemed to be what fixed it. Can anyone verify wether that would make things work or not?
Also, my system (Ubuntu 6.10) required me to first install the install-mbr command:
install-mbr /dev/sda
-nFriedly 4 December 2006 22:36 (EST)
qemu
Hi I would like to know what exactly you mean with booting from within windows. Because this would perfectly match what I am looking for.
- A portable system (linux prefered) - Which I can boot from - and which (in case I cannot boot from) can be started in windows as well as in Linux
So here is my question can I boot from any of these systems ? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
You can boot a PC from what is called a LIVE CD. It is designed to let you boot into Linux without installing it on your hard drive or damaging anything in your current system. Your computer must be able to boot from a CD to do it though.
To "boot inside windows", you need a virtual machine. Look at Pendrivelinux.com under the topic virtual machine to run linux inside windows. It's pretty cool. With it you can "boot up" a Linux Live CD ISO that is on your hard drive from within windows. It is at: http://pendrivelinux.com/. The software is called VirtualBox.
I was even able to run Gparted inside the Linux virtual machine to modify some partitions on a USB drive not being used by Windows or Linux at the time.
There are many Live CD's available on the internet. You need the ISO file, which is usually about 600 or 700MB, the size of a CD. You can burn the ISO to a CD to boot from the CD if you don't want to run it inside windoze. A bunch of them are linked here: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/30/live-cd-repository/#more-84
Mac
It would be nice to have a "From within Mac OS X" section.
Installing from within Windows
I feel that this section is very unclear. When told to "run syslinux for the drive," I don't really understand what to do. I think somebody should really clarify this section.
Agreed, this is quite unclear. Please someone help?
Agreed again by me.
Maybe we have to install the syslinux we just downloaded?
Help about using syslinux
Hello people,I am a windows user and this DSL seemed to be the perfect choice for myself.But I can't find out how I run syslinux.I have used cmd to move to the folder containing syslinux.exe,and when I run syslinux -ma F:\ it says:
Usage:syslinux.exe [-sfmar][-d directory](drive): bootsecfile
Anyway,I think somebody here can help me.I will appreciate any help.
Update:I finally got DSL to work.Thank you for creating this awesome OS,it's awesome.
