Flash Drive

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "GP" == Gary P <list at akwebhosting.net> writes:

GP> All the readme and how'tos i found so far on the net dont
GP> work. has anyone gotten a flash stick to bootup and actually
GP> load??

Sure, I did it just by dd'ing diskboot.img to a flash drive I had
lying around.  I found it a little small so I just looked at the
script that generates it (/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/mk-images.i386)
and made a larger image with room for more kernels.

Here's the basics:

mkdir -p $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath
dd if=/dev/zero of=$TOPDESTPATH/images/diskboot.img bs=1M count=6 2>/dev/null
mkdosfs $TOPDESTPATH/images/diskboot.img
$SYSLINUX $TOPDESTPATH/images/diskboot.img
mount -o loop $TOPDESTPATH/images/diskboot.img $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath
cp -r $TOPDESTPATH/isolinux/* $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath/
grep -v local $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath/isolinux.cfg > $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath/syslinux.cfg
rm -f $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath/isolinux.cfg
umount -f $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath
rmdir $TOPDESTPATH/images/fobpath

change the count=6 on the second line to approximate the size of your
flask drive if you want to fill it.  I used 126 for a 128MB drive I
had around.

But honestly, if diskboot.img didn't work for you then I think you
must have some other issue.  The image worked for me on pretty much
every USB-bootable machine I have access to.

You aren't dd'ing the image to a partition on the flash drive, are
you?  It should be something like:

dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sda

not

dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sda1

 - J<