Installing Debian on USB sticks.

[James Allsopp <jamesaallsopp@googlemail.com>]

Hi,
Recently I placed the netinst i386 debian installer on an old USB stick
using:
zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdc

and I've installed one machine using it. However yesterday I was trying
to install debian itself on a USB stick and the installer found it could
connect to a couple of the mirrors but that it couldn't find a correct
version. Could this be due to the transition from lenny to squeeze?

I'm also wondering if this is the correct procedure for installing a
working debian installation on USB stick. A problem I ran into yesterday
was that I installed grub onto the MBR and overwrote the MBR on my
laptop's HD. Fixed it now but would like to know how to get around that
and install it to the USB stick.

My eventual goal is to have a USB debian install that my gf can use on
computers (i386 or newer architecture) at work, as they don't give out
install privileges.

Thanks for any advice.
Jim