Regarding installing to the thumb drive. Have never done it before but would try:
In BIOS, set CD/DVD to first boot sequence.Set thumb drive to second boot sequence, [assuming your mbd recognizes thumb drives as bootable]
etc....Then putting linux install disk in cd/dvd drive it should open up and you should be able to get to your thumb drive and set it up as you would a standard HD, but I would not set grub to MBR, but to the boot of the thumb drive so you don't mess up your hard drive. I screwed up once and set grub to mbr and then removed the linux drive later and played hell trying to get anything to work as the boot sequence did not show the linux drive anymore and it was a major problem for me to get the mbr back to the windows standard. Thank God I had another computer to do research and burn CD's.
Anyway, that's what I would do. Also this was done w. the old grub. If you are using the new grub I'm lost on it. I just let it do it's thing and pray.
HTH Whit On 10/06/2012 11:57 AM, Wally Lepore wrote:
Hi, I would like to install Debian Live to a USB dtive (thumb drive) on Windows. Will this install work? I am using Debian Live to test my hardware and firmware prior to installing "Squeeze" from a netinst install CD (that I already buned). In the Debian FAQ there is only a mention on how to accomplish the USB Live version install using a Linux system. (8th FAQ from the bottom). http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb Also, I will not damage USB flash drive accomplishing the procedure? I have 2 and 4 gig thumb drives. Thank you