Rob Owens wrote:
On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 03:16:12PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:Mark Filipak wrote:GRUB & LILO install failures unexplained - no help.Well that makes perfect sense. GRUB and LILO boot loaders designed to work with a hard drive. You (probably) need to install a different boot loader on a USB stick - and which one is dependent on what your BIOS supports (and, of course, you have to set your BIOS appropriately). Booting from a CD/DVD follows a different process - using isolinux as the boot loader.GRUB will work on a USB stick. I have Debian installed on a USB stick right now and it uses GRUB. Syslinux is another way of doing it, but I don't know enough about it to comment one way or another.
come to think of it, if one is not REALLY careful, it's pretty easy to install a boot image on a USB stick, but then install the boot loader on the attached hard drive -- if you don't partition things properly, and don't use the right options, grub-install will go ahead and stick the boot loader on your attached hard disk, rather than the USB stick; or fail when it tries to access a non-existent MBR on the USB stick that hasn't been partitioned to have one
in fact, I expect that's what's happening to Mark when he tries to install GRUB - the installer is either:
a) trying to install on the hdd, which he's disconnected (fail), or,b) trying to install to the USB stick, which hasn't been partitioned properly (fail).
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra