Mark Trickett <[email protected]> writes: > I am wanting to install Debian to a USB stick. Has anyone attempted > this, and what problems and special techniques are required?
BTDT. You can simply treat it as a hard disk. Writes are slow; HTFU. > I have UNetbootin, Noooooo. That is a GUI toy for pointy-clicky idiots. Anything using isolinux ≥4 is isohybrid-capable, and official Debian Live images are already passed through isohybrid, meaning you can just write "cat foo.iso >/dev/sdX" and it'll boot. If you want a persistent area, that is more fiddly, and maybe unetbootin is less hassle than teaching you about the live-boot(5) and live-config(5) manpages and how to pull the syslinux.cfg, kernel, ramdisk and filesystem.squashfs out of the ISO and dropping them onto a USB filesystem. Or use live-build to such a USB key from scratch, but you probably don't care to invest time learning about that. I *think* they don't offer prebuilt Debian Live disk images anymore (except ISO). And I think that doesn't support a persistent cow area on the same disk when you write it to USB. You might be able to just write the ISO to /dev/sdX1 and put mbr.bin on /dev/sdX and have the persistent cow on /dev/sdX2... not sure if isohybrid will DTRT there. >wanders off muttering to self< > Any comments about resizing and repartitioning? I would like to retain > a NTFS stub with the Seagate software, which includes the serial > number of the drive. gparted can resize NTFS. ntfs-3g (NOT mount -t ntfs) can write to NTFS. You could either resize the NTFS filesystem, or just create foo.ext2 inside it, loopback mount it and copy your files inside. If they're just user docs, it's probably safe to copy them directly to the NTFS partition—I wouldn't do that for the OS files, though—I dunno if NTFS is close enough to a Unix filesystem to support all the necessary metadata. _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
