Hi, as indicated by the forum section, I am a newbie to the whole linux thing and i'm trying to transition. Mainly because I'm starting to hate windows... Anyways, I have a 4GB PNY attache. Just recently, I downloaded the live usb creator, and downloaded all the components for a live usb running version 12 of Fedora. I noticed that, after completion of the download, the components written to my USB seemed far too few. At the time, my USB contained the following:

a boot folder, with olpc.fth
a folder entitled EFI containing another boot folder, with the second folder holding various files.
and then a 16KB file entitled GPL.

when I tried to boot the live USB, nothing came up and it booted XP just like normal. afterwards, I rebooted it, taking care to check the defaults on my BIOS settings. It says that it enables booting of live USBs, so I have no real reason to question the defaults.

So my question is, 1)Could someone walk me through this, or 2) are there any (easier?) alternatives?
-Ryan

The easiest and safest is to use a live cd/dvd, it obviously runs much slower but at least you get a taster. Otherwise pick a 'distro' that will shrink your present partition and set up linux on your hard drive. Be mindful of whether your Windows is on one partition or two and if you have enough Ram to temporarily accommodate your data during the shrinking process.Logical volumes can also be a problem but don't let these put you off, just have your Windows disk to hand!
If you must put linux on a pen drive do it on a linux system as I don't think NTFS will read ext3 and the like, hence Samba and Unison, etc.
Fred.

Look at "Install Fedora to a Flash Drive using Windows" - http://www.pendrivelinux.com/install...using-windows/

Thanks for responding to my request. When I was using the "liveusb-creator", I didn't give any space for the persistent overlay. Could that be my problem? Also, I'm not quite sure that I want to commit to running a form of linux on my pc yet, that's why I'm trying to get it onto a thumb drive. In addition, it's a class requirement for next year... I suppose I could have one of the computer tech. teachers at my school help. However, I would like to resolve the problem through this site. In addition, when I did download fedora, and it said usb creation process complete, I clicked the "create usb" button once more, and, realizing my mistake I closed the tool. Could that be another problem? Should I have let it run through the entire process again? If I have to download a live cd/dvd as a last resort, I will, but I would much rather try to resolve a blunder that I made before moving on to something else.

edit: I deleted all the data on my USB and then re did it using the max system overlay. This created an additional folder labeled LiveOS and added some stuff. The USB creator now says that I have successfully installed a live OS to my USB. Unfortunately, it won't boot with my computer running XP, it just boots like normal still. Anyone have a solution?

If you must bare in mind how useful is it? Where will you use your portable linux o/s? Imagine a hotelier letting you change their bios so it will boot?
Still, note that many pen drives come complete with a little partition that will stop you making it bootable. You need a clean pen drive before you can get anywhere. I'm not going to recommend makes, not least because they differ country to country.

Fred.

IN your BIOS, do you have the USB before the normal hard disk in the boot order ?.