Re: Installing Debian from USB pen drive

["Adrian Levi" <adrian.levi@gmail.com>]

On 29/02/2008, Santanu Chatterjee <thisissantanu@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Everybody,
>
>  I was trying to install a very basic debian system from my 2GB
>  USB Pen Drive. For that, I did the following:
>
>  o Formatted my pen drive as a single 2GB FAT16 partition (/dev/sdb)
>  o Did a "# syslinux -sf /dev/sdb" to make it bootable
>  o Downloaded
>    "http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r3/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r3-i386-netinst.iso";
>    and placed a copy of this iso file on the pendrive as netinst.iso
>    (renaming was not due to any particular reason)
>  o Opened the iso image in file-roller and copied the '/install.386'
>    folder from it to the toplevel directory in my pendrive.
>  o Then copied all the files from the '/isolinux' directory in the iso iimage
>    to the toplevel directory in my pendrive.
>  o Renamed isolinux.cfg in the pendrive to syslinux.cfg.
>
>  When I try to boot from the pendrive, it boots just fine, and the installer
>  starts OK. But then, it cannot find the cdrom. Thats OK, because there
>  is no cdrom in the drive. But I want it to install from the 'netinst.iso' image.
>  But I can't find a way to make it do the install from the iso image.
>
>  Can anyone tell me how to make the installer install from the iso image?
>  Thanks in advance for your help.
>
>  Regards,
>  Santanu

Have you tried mounting the image from the console (in the installer)
and then pointing the installer to the local repository?

Adrian