Debian Live on a USB memory stick?

[chrislale at untrammelled.co.uk (Chris Lale)]

I have made a little progress. I cannont get Grub to boot from my USB 
stick. Smart Bootloader will install to the USB's MBR, but will not boot 
vmlinuz from it. This leaves Syslinux.

I installed Syslinux and put a syslinux.cfg file in the USB's root:

    DEFAULT vmlinuz
    APPEND append initrd=initrd.gz root=/dev/sda1 boot=casper
    TIMEOUT 500
    SAY Debian Live

I put the contents of the live/image directory into the USB , excluding 
the isolinux directory:

    casper
    initrd.gz
    ldlinux.sys
    syslinux.cfg
    vmlinuz

The system boots from the USB, opens vmlinuz (dots on screen) and 
creates the ram disc with initrd.gz (dots on screen). It then starts to 
boot linux but eventually fails trying to mount a CD from my empty CD 
drive in /dev/hdc:

    /init: 111: Cannot open /dev/hdc: No medium found.
    mount: Mounting ro on /dev/hdc failed: No such device.

Is the CD mount command in initrd.gz or is it something to do with 
squashfs? Is there an obvious way around this? Presumably, the system is 
trying to get the filesystem from the CD when it needs to get it from 
the USB (/dev/sda1).


Andrew Donnellan wrote:

>The USB stick wouldn't have a proper boot sector on it, so yes,
>installing GRUB might work.
>
>On 4/10/06, Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk> wrote:
>  
>
>>I followed the wiki instructions for making a Debian Live CD with
>>live-package and it worked first time! Brilliant.
>>
>>Is it possible to create a bootable Debian Live USB stick? I used cfdisk
>>to format my 256MB memory stick with the Boot flag set and formatted it
>>with mkfs.vfat. I copied the contents of the live/image/ directory onto
>>the memory stick and tried to boot from it. I got a message saying that
>>the disc was not bootable and asking me to insert a bootable floppy. Do
>>I need to do something else - install Grub perhaps?
>>
>>I would be grateful for any suggestions.
>>
>>    
>>