Making a USB pen drive bootable via bootdisk.img

[Daniel Stonier]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 12:44:55 -0400, Chris Curran <ccurran at tylernet.com>  
wrote:

> Hi, hello:
>
> I'm having a good bit of trouble making a bootable USB pen drive from
> the bootdisk.img file from Fedora 2. I follow what little instruction
> there is in the README (dd the bootdisk.img file to the USB device),
> however, all I wind up with is 4 garbage partitions on the USB device
> (checked with fdisk). I can use this USB pen drive in "normal" mode
> (formated and hot plug works - hotplug was disabled while trying to dd
> the bootdisk.img).
>
> I've searched the archives for 'bootdisk.img' and 0 hits. Has anyone out
> there been able to use the bootdisk.img that's included with Fedora 2 to
> make a bootable USB pen drive?
>
> thanks,
> Chris Curran

I've recently been trying to boot from a usb hard drive and the one  
problem I had
to get around there involved including the usb modules in the image and
modifying its script to load them up so it would recognize the device.  
Might not
be exactly the same process but might point you in the right direction.

Some instructions on messing around with bootable images that might be  
useful if
you haven't already found it. Note I also had to load up usbcore before  
the modules
he's listed there.

		http://www.benusa.com/linux/boot.htm

Whyever do usb pen drives come with 4 partitions, and why are they always  
only
seen as one? I've never worked that out. And all the pen drive filesystems  
have
gone bananas on me at some stage or another until I've reformatted them  
into
1 partition with fdisk and mkfs.ext3 or mkfs.vfat. Never had any trouble  
after
that.

Regards,
Daniel Stonier.

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