USB Boot Linux – Mission Accomplished !!!
Posted by Jerry on 12:24 - December 7, 2006
YES !!! Finally I was able to make my USB Thumb Drive Bootable. Phew!!! I had to go through what all, but nothing like the pleasure of achieving it 
So here is what i did. This is information form many places which i feel is the best way to do.
Something on the system config. I was usin; it was SUSE10.1 on an IBM Thinkpad R50E. So here it goes.
1. Download dsl-3.0-syslinux.iso .
2. Plug in the USB drive and find out which device node it is located at. Most of the drives will be at /dev/sda.
3. Partitioning the USB Drive. The drive shouldnot be mounted while doing this. Since I was using SUSE10.1, which unlike RH9(my previous flavour), auto-mounts the drive to a folder in /media, I had to unmount the drive first before partitioning. Then use fdisk to partition the drive,
$ fdisk /dev/sda1 (assuming that the device node is /dev/sda1)
Here you delete all the partitions by repeatedly using ‘d’. Create a new partition pressing ‘n’, ‘p’, 1 and accept all defaults concerning the size. Set the bootable flag with ‘a’, press ‘t’, 6 to create a FAT16 partition and press ‘w’ to store and exit from fdisk.
4. Since I used and ISO image of DSL, we need to mount it and extract the files. Do the following as root.
- mkdir dsl_temp
- mkdir dsl_usb
- mount -o loop dsl-*syslinux.iso dsl_temp
- cp -a dsl_temp/* dsl_usb
- cd dsl_usb
- mkdir usb_pen
- mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 usb_pen
- cp -a dsl_usb/* usb_pen
- umount usb_pen
- umount dsl_temp
- syslinux /dev/sda1
VOILA !!! Its done. Make sure your BIOS settings is having boot from USB enabled.
Reboot the system and enjoy the fun.
For more info Check out these pages too
It was from the first link I was able to get things working with a slight modification. I am yet to figure out why FAT16 partition was required and why things didnt work the way they mentioned in the link.
Also i need to do it the DSL way too as mentioned in the DSL Wiki
Happy Hacking till then ..
mtnbkr said
minor typo:
In step 3, fdisk /dev/sda1 needs to be: fdisk /dev/sda
latzlito said
I use the tutorials at http://pendrivelinux.com
You can find almost every USB Linux install tutorial there.