Re: Installing Debian on USB sticks.
On 02/09/2011 04:29 AM, James Allsopp wrote:
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
The easiest / safest / most fool proof way is to perform the install on
a machine with no harddrive, I don't do this because I have a bunch of
install images ready to be pushed onto any drive or device
I take the image (from a non booted single partition system) with
something like this
###############################################################################
img_dir=/mnt/smb_docs
src_drv=/dev/sdX
src_part_no=n
# identify partition label & UUID
ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid/
e2label ${src_drv}${src_part_no}
# set image file name in the form of
# description, architecture, drive, boot loader, date, partition label, uuid
img_file_name=debian_squeeze_dsktp_686_sda1_GRUB2_11_02_03_DebianSqueezeX86_80000000-4000-4000-4000-120000000000
# Mount source install
echo ${src_drv}${src_part_no}
echo ${img_dir}/img/${img_file_name}
umount ${src_drv}${src_part_no}
mkdir -p ${img_dir}/img/
mkdir -p /mnt/src
mount ${src_drv}${src_part_no} /mnt/src
cd /mnt
# delete swap file (not usually installed on my images anyway)
# & some other host specific files
rm -f /mnt/src/var/swap
rm -f /mnt/src/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
rm -f /mnt/src/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules
rm -f /mnt/src/var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
# Take the image
ls ${img_dir}/img/${img_file_name}.tar.gz
nice -n 19 tar czvf ${img_dir}/img/${img_file_name}.tar.gz ./src
ls -la ${img_dir}/img/${img_file_name}.tar.gz
# I back up the boot sector & partition table for safety
dd if=${src_drv} of=${img_dir}/img/mbr/mbr_${img_file_name}_446.ddimg
bs=446 count=1
dd if=${src_drv} of=${img_dir}/img/mbr/mbr_${img_file_name}_512.ddimg
bs=512 count=1
# unmount & spin down drive (particularly if you're hot swapping)
umount ${src_drv}*
umount ${src_drv}*
hdparm -y ${src_drv}
hdparm -Y ${src_drv}
hdparm -C ${src_drv}
###############################################################################
I install the image like this
###############################################################################
img_dir=/mnt/smb_docs
img_file_name=debian_squeeze_dsktp_686_sda1_GRUB2_11_02_03_DebianSqueezeX86_80000000-4000-4000-4000-120000000000
dst_drv=/dev/sdX
part_no=n
# for flash drives ideally leave the manufacturer partition table
# it's probably aligned correctly so just change the ID to 83
# & set the bootable flag
fdisk -cu ${dst_drv}
# format the partition (on Flash you probably want ext2 instead)
mkfs.ext4 -v ${dst_drv}${part_no} -L DebianSqueezeX86
tune2fs ${dst_drv}${part_no} -U 80000000-4000-4000-4000-120000000000
# mount destination as ./src as that's the path in my .tar files
mkdir -p /mnt/src
mount ${dst_drv}${part_no} /mnt/src
cd /mnt
ls -la ${img_dir}/img/${img_file_name}.tar.gz
nice -n 19 tar xzvf ${img_dir}/img/${img_file_name}.tar.gz
rm -f /mnt/src/var/swap
rm -f /mnt/src/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
rm -f /mnt/src/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules
rm -f /mnt/src/var/lib/ntp/ntp.drift
# on a portable system this keeps network connections @ eth0 & wlan0
chmod -c 644 /lib/udev/write_*
# fix the /boot/grub/device.map and fstab on new drive
# so they point to the new drive
ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid/
ls -la /dev/disk/by-id/
cat /mnt/src/boot/grub/device.map
vim /mnt/src/boot/grub/device.map
vim /mnt/src/etc/fstab
# install grub, on first boot you may have to manually enter
# correct uuid then as root run update-grub2
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/src ${dst_drv}
umount ${dst_drv}*
umount ${dst_drv}*
hdparm -y ${dst_drv}
hdparm -Y ${dst_drv}
hdparm -C ${dst_drv}
Your done.
This way I have a fully functioning install with all my preferences up
and running in minutes, it's great for an experimental upgrade to sid or
to push a web-server install onto a laptop while I play musical hardware.
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