[TriLUG] Live Linux on USB Flash Drive

[Scott G. Hall]

I just wanted to followup: As you know I am trying to create some
"thinner" clients from older PCs and laptops, but I had previously
been unsuccessful in getting a Ubuntu 7.10 live CD distro. to boot
from a USB flash drive. I had been using instructions that included
using syslinux and so forth, but I not could get my boxes to boot
to it. The main problem I was experiencing was that the filesystem
type was not being recognized. You can't use NTFS, ReiserFS or
Ext-2/3. I ended up using Fat-32. I think this may have to do with
the age of the BIOS' that I was trying to boot to -- they would boot
to USB drives, but only FAT-based ones. You can create a small boot
partition formatted using FAT-32 (or for that matter FAT-16 since
it needs to be only 1MB or so) to hold GRUB and the boot drivers
needed to read the larger Linux filesystem. You do run into problems
with some machines where the second partition is not referred to
by the same device position (Ubuntu always uses /dev/sd?? but other
distros like Slackware and PuppyLinux differ).

I received several good suggestions (some posted here), including
scripts and executable code. I want to thank all contributers for
their help. Besides the pointers and scripts posted here, I just
ran into another link from ZDNet:

"How to … install Ubuntu 8.04 on a USB flash drive"
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1873&tag=nl.e540

However, you may have to experiment some when using older 486 and
Pentium-1 and Pentium-2 PCs to get a working combination.

-- 
Scott G. Hall
Raleigh, NC, USA
ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net