Re: how to make bootable live wheezy USB that doesn't use isohybrid

[Jeffrey Mark Siskind <qobi@purdue.edu>]

   > I'd like to make a live wheezy USB dongle. I followed the instructions on

   Why wheezy ... it's old.

I have been running wheezy for about 5 years without any problem. The machine
has two partitions / and /aux. I attempted a fresh install of jessie in /.
But the install failed and the machine won't boot. It appears that the kernel
in jessie tickles something in the hardware that wasn't tickled by wheezy. I
will likely upgrade the firmware. (Dell Poweredge machines have a lot of
distinct firmware components besides the BIOS.) But before I do, I want to get
the data off the /aux partition. So I want to boot something that I know works.

   >    https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb
   > 
   > to make a live USB from
   > 
   >    http://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/7.11.0-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-7.11.0-amd64-standard.iso

   There are many ways to make a bootable HDD image if this can be booted.

   By using aufs or newer overlayfs, you can choose to make OS persistent
   while your running system writing on RAM(tmpfs).

    https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/InstallOnSDcardOrUsbStick
    I have not tested but this may give you hint.

   I also use kvm to install system on USB connected HDD from my working
   Debian system.

   many ways ...

I don't need it to be persistent. I just need to get enough of a root shell to
run tar|ssh to get the data off of /aux. /aux is /dev/md1 which is RAID5
across /dev/sd[a-f]2. So I need enough to be able to mount that read-only.
Then when that is done I will upgrade the firmware and reattempt a jessie
install.

So I'd appreciate help getting the easiest way to get a root shell with tar,
ssh, and mdadm.

The issue is that the machine is too old to boot isohybrid from USB. It needs
to boot msdos from fat32 on USB. See other emails in this thread.

    Jeff (http://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi)