Booting from a USB key

[Dolf Starreveld]

My machine currently has RH9 installed, and I wanted to check out FC2 
without wiping my installation. I have a USB key, and I figured I 
might be able to set it up to boot with a newer kernel.
I found a note on the Fedora site on how to do this, which involves 
copying the isolinux directory to the usb key and renaming the 
isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg and running syslinyx.
So, that's what I did. I modified the config slightly to add an 
option to boot my normal RH setup.
If I boot my redhat setup, things work fine. If I try to boot the FC2 
test version, a kernel starts, but dies with:

EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev 09:02, iso_blknum=16, block=32

Now, the interesting difference between my RH boot option and the FC 
boot option is this


label RH9
	kernel RH9VMZ
	append initrd=RH9IRD.img root=/dev/hda5

label FC2
	kernel FC2VVMZ
	append initrd=FC2IRD.img ramdisk_size=8192

the xxxVMZ files are copies of the respective vmlinuz files, the 
xxxIRD.img are copies of the respective initrd.img files.

I suppose the FC2 version is booting and then tries to move the root 
file system to something that is normally read of the CD-ROM? I'd be 
happy to add the same root= option to the FC case as I used for the 
RH case, but when I tried that I got a little further, but the init 
process died and left me with just a root file system mounted.

Either way, it seems that the note at 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-January/msg00097.html
is not the whole story.

Suggestions or ideas?