On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 07:14:59PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
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.
Rob... can you say a bit more about how you partition the USB stick,
how you configure your BIOS, and anything special you do re. the
GRUB install (e.g., re. the fact that USB sticks don't have an MBR).
I know that I've built bootable USB sticks in the past, but can't
remember the details other than that I used the USBHDD boot option
in my BIOS.
I used to use Debian Live, which uses syslinux. Due to the way Debian
Live is structured, you can't do kernel updates (this may be outdated
information, but it was true at least 2 years ago).
So I decided to switch to straight Debian on a USB stick. I used a Dell
laptop (can't remember which one) to perform the installation. I booted
from a netinst i386 CD. When it came time for partitioning, I treated
the USB stick just like it was a hard drive. The installer created a
partition table and I created a single large partition for the root
filesystem (formatted to ext4).
The first time I did this, GRUB installed itself to the MBR of the hard
disk. My USB stick was therefore only bootable on that laptop. I fixed
that USB stick by installing GRUB (I can't remember the exact commands).
The next time I did this type of installation, I answered "no" to
"install GRUB to the MBR". The installer then gave me a choice of where
to install GRUB. I specified /dev/sdb (which was my USB stick). It
worked. I did at least one other USB stick installation this way.
All of this was using Squeeze.
I didn't do anything special with the BIOS, other than to configure it
to boot from USB (some BIOS's say USB hard drive, but it still works).
I have booted my Debian USB stick off of several Dell laptops, a Toshiba
laptop, a Dell desktop, and possibly more that I can't remember. It
seems to work just as well as Debian Live, and there is no special setup
required for things like persistence.
I did this same type of installation on a USB hard drive and the process
was identical as far as I can remember.
All of my USB sticks are Sandisk brand.