Monday, March 06, 2006

Boot from USB stick (new install)


Moosy created a bootable SUSE Linux stick for fast new installations in our data center.

With this stick we can now start the installation of any NLD/SLES/SL over a network connection (http, ftp) or from an other partition/drive on the local machine.

Here is a little howto:

1.) Take your USB stick, must be FAT16 partitioned (standard)

2.) Check the device and the device (dmesg and mount command)

3.) umount /dev/sdb1

4.) syslinux /dev/sdb1

5.) cd into your linux_dvd:/suse10/boot
mkbootdisk --96 --partition /dev/sdb1 dvd://suse10

(96 to have an images for 32 and 64 bit os)

Make sure your Bios is set to boot from usb

howto suse linux boot bootable usb stick

article about damn small linux on a usb stick

PXES distro for thin client

5 comments:

Peppie said...

Cool, exactly what I was looking for, thanks Moose!

Anonymous said...

Moose, you rock big time

Anonymous said...

There is no need for the syslinux command.

mkbootdisk installs syslinux if you use --partition

You can even do it without the CD download the mini iso and loopmount it.

losetup /dev/loop0 SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-x86_64-mini.iso
mkdir /mnt/susecd
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/susecd
/mnt/susecd/boot/x86_64/mkbootdisk --64 --partition /dev/sdb1 /mnt/susecd

Anonymous said...

The stick does not need to be fat16
I use fat32 all the time.
Unless you are saying that some bios's might not understand fat32?

Also, since this is for new installs, it might be nice to know it's doable all from Windows as well.
http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=Internet_Install
http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_without_CD#Installing_from_data_stored_on_another_machine_.28Internet.2FNetwork_install.29

I didn't know about this awsome way from the moosy article so I've only been using the windows I posted to the two wiki's. Maybe the mkbootdisk way doesn't work with fat32?

www.ventaxcatalogo.com said...

This won't actually have effect, I suppose like this.