Booting from a USB stick

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I just put the Fedora KDE Live CD on a USB stick,
> and succeeded in booting 2 machines with it,
> one a very small VIA EPIA machine.
> Both worked fine
> 
> I followed the instructions at
> <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo>
> but found one part didn't work for me.
> 
> You are advised to write the MBR with
>         cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdb
> This didn't work, and I did what I would have done anyway:
>         dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb
> 
Both methods should work. I prefer using dd myself.

> The other point is that rather surprisingly
> the instructions did not point to the ISO required.
> 
You are supposed to run it from the directory with the CD image. You
should be able give the full path to the image as the image name if
you run from a different directory.

> Finally, I found the USB stick was (perhaps not surprisingly)
> mounted read-only, so one could not eg add a user;
> or rather, one could, but it was not there on re-booting.
> 
Are you sure the USB stick was mounted read-only, or was it just the
compressed file system that was mounted read-only? The reason I ask,
is because what this install does is copy the compressed file
system, and the files needed to load/boot it over to the USB stick.
The main advantages of using the USB stick are access speed, and
physical size.

It is possible to install and boot from a USB stick, but I am not
sure about the life of the USB stick when doing so. There are some
things you can do to cut down on the number of writes to the USB
stick...

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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