Booting ISO images from a USB disk

The documentation on this is out there.. you just have to look pretty hard. I finally found what I needed here http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html.


BE CAREFUL NOT TO OVERWRITE THE MBR OR BOOTLOADER ON YOUR PRIMARY BOOT DISK! BACK THEM UP BEFORE YOU BEGIN THIS PROCESS!


Here is a detailed example of how to make a bootable USB disk:

What you will need:

Hardware:

• A USB disk large enough to hold the .iso image (which may be compressed using gzip or zip)
  
• A device which has a BIOS capable of booting from USB. (It is possible to boot from another disk and chainload to the USB disk but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.)

Software:

• A Linux operating system (I am using Fedora 16 .. Debian based distros' filesystem is different. Things like package managers and the location of memdisk and vesamenu.c32 will differ.)
• The ISO image you wish to boot
• Bash (or your favorite shell)
• Gedit (or your favorite text editor - I'm not sure if both <cr> and <lf> are acceptable as I do not use Windows)
• Syslinux
• Memdisk (included with Syslinux)
• Vesamenu.c32 (included with Syslinux)
• Parted/Gparted
• Fdisk (optional)
• mkfs.vfat

Steps:

1. Open a shell (i.e. Bash)

2.Make sure you have the packages required and that they are up to date. Use one of the following:

yum list installed | less

or

yum list installed | grep syslinux yum list installed | grep etc.

Note: Debian based distros use apt-get as the default package manager. Also you may want to check out Yum Extender if you are using Fedora

3.Plug in your USB disk and determine which device node it is by issuing the following command:

sudo fdisk -l

or by issuing the following command after you plug in your USB disk:

dmesg | tail

4.Unmount the usb disk using the following command:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

5.Make a FAT filesystem on the partition you wish to boot from using the following command:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

6. Install a MBR (master boot record) to your USB disk if you don't already have one or the one you have is not working properly. Use the following command:

sudo syslinux -m /dev/sdb

7.Install Syslinux to the partition you wish to boot from by issuing the following command:

sudo syslinux -i /dev/sdb1 sudo parted /dev/sdb set 1 boot on

Note: if your device node happens to be /dev/sdc2 you would use the following command:

sudo parted /dev/sdc set 2 boot on

8.Mount the USB disk:

mkdir /media/usb_disk mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb_disk

9.Now copy the files you need to the root directory (or the directory you chose to install to) of the partition which has Syslinux installed on it.

Note: The location of these files is different on Debian based systems. I am using an Enterprise style filesystem. On Debian based distros the location will be something like /usr/lib/syslinux/ but I'm not 100% positive.

cp -v /user/share/syslinux/memdisk /media/usb_disk cp -v /user/share/syslinux/vesamenu.c32 /media/usb_disk

10.Copy the iso image to a directory on your USB disk using the command:

mkdir /usb_disk/distro cp /user/username/Downloads/distro.iso /media/usb_disk/distro/

11.Create a file named syslinux.cfg in the directory you installed Syslinux to. Use the following command:

touch /media/usb_disk/syslinux.cfg

12.Open syslinux.cfg with your favorite text editor and edit it to look something like this:

DEFAULT vesamenu.c32 TIMEOUT 30 PROMPT 1 #DISPLAY boot.msg #F1 boot.msg #F2 f2 #F3 f3 LABEL gb KERNEL memdisk INITRD /GeexBox/geexbox-2.0-i386.iso APPEND iso raw LABEL dsl KERNEL memdisk INITRD /DamnSmallLinux/dsl.iso APPEND iso raw

Note: Versions of Syslinux prior to 4.04 also needed the raw parameter. Syslinux can handle disk images that have been compressed with zip or gzip. The smaller files load faster and CRC checks provide data integrity. Just compress the image and use the compressed image filename in the menu entry.

^^ This last note is a direct quote from the webpage which was linked to at the start of this tutorial. Nothing else has been copied directly. I can not begin to list all of the sites that were referenced.


HOPE THIS WAS USEFUL!
HAVE A LOOK AT THE THINGS I TRIED GETTING THIS TO WORK!
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...g-file-635911/

LOL!

NOTE: I wrote this from memory & I will update it tomorrow while following my own tutorial.

Good write-up, but I noticed one thing.... You should edit your post and mention that this tutorial is meant for systems using yum, like Fedora, etc. Besides that, you did a good job on the tutorial!

Cheers,

Josh

Thanks for the response. Done. By the way should this be in the tutorials section under LQ ISO?

It can be, yes. Contact a moderator, and/or report your thread to be reviewed and possibly moved.

Cheers,

Josh