Update: You might be interested in this post “Live iso(distro) without burning & partitioning“

Two days ago I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Gusty Tribe 2 (What a pathetic name?). I only had one blank CD left, and the burning process was interrupt by some unknown force. There is no point going to town to get a new CD, so, I started messing around my USB drive.

First what I tried was writing entire CD iso image into the usb drive. As far as I know, there is no easier way to do that in windows. So, I used another real live CD, and used “dd”. What I thought was by writing the iso image, it would behave like a CD and it will work, but It didn’t.

After going through some tutorials in the internet, I came to know that the best solution is syslinux. That’s pretty easy to install also. If you are in windows, download the syslinux, and extract it. Open the command prompt, go to the syslinux folder(if it’s “c:\syslinux\” then type “cd c:\syslinux”) and execute “syslinux X:” where X is your usb drive letter.

Then, to test whether it was executed properly, you can go to the usb drive and do a “dir /a”. It should have a file called “ldlinux.sys”. If it’s there, try booting from the usb drive. Then, it’ll complain the kernel image “linux” is not there. That means it’s installed. If it says, “Boot Error”, there is a HP disk format utility, you can download that and format the disk. If you are in linux, you can use “fdisk” and “mkfs.vfat”. Make sure you mark the partition as boot.

Then simply extract all the files from the ISO into the usb drive. Actually, after this step you have to configure the boot options, move some files here and there, but since I’m not going to keep Ubuntu on my usb forever, I just didn’t do any configuring. To boot up linux, just coping is enough.

So, again restart, and since we haven’t done any configuration, it will surely ask for the kernel again. The kernel is casper/vmlinuz. You also have to mention some kernel parameters. Here is my command.


/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram rw


However, If you are going to try Ubuntu Gusty Tribe II, it’s not stable yet. So, if you don’t want your linux to crash time to time, install feisty fawn. Since, my modem still doesn’t work in linux, I didn’t install it.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Hacks, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.