I had problems installing slackware on linutop HW (
www.linutop.com)
from a USB stick. The BIOS (or whatever is controlling this stuff)
didn't recognize the stick as a bootable device and continued to boot
from HDD (yap, I had USB-HDD as my primary boot device and yap, I have
checked the md5 sum of usbboot.img that I had downloaded). My suspision
is that it was eather the raw filesystem or lilo that was problematic
(I'm realy not an expert though).
So rather then switching to PXE boot, which is a pain in the neck, I've
tried to create my own USB image, while reusing the kernel
and the other files from inside the usbboot.img.
The size of the USB stick Im using is 1GB, on the web page I'm mentioning at the bootom of
this text they say that one should use fat32 when using a stick
bigger than 2GB. But I don't know how relevant it is.
On my system the usb stick shows up as /dev/sdb.
Here are some (vague I must admit) notes on how I did
this.
--- partition the usb stick ------------------------------------------
cfdisk /dev/sdb
make one partition
make it bootable
set type fat16 (or fat32?)
write and exit
--- install grub -----------------------------------------------------
cd /tmp
mkdir slackware
mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/slackware
mkdir -p /tmp/slackware/boot/grub
# This might be in /lib/grub/i386-pc on some systems.
cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* /tmp/slackware/boot/grub/
# Not sure about the next step (is it needed? what it does exactly?)
echo '(hd0) /dev/sdb' > /tmp/slackware/boot/grub/device.map
grub-install --root-directory=/tmp/slackware /dev/sdb
(don't unmount /tmp/slackware just yet)
--- copy kernel and stuff --------------------------------------------
get the usbboot.img from
www.slackware.com
modprobe loop
mkdir -p /tmp/usbboot
mount -o loop,ro usbboot.img /tmp/usbboot
cp /tmp/usbboot/* /tmp/slackware/
umount /tmp/slackware
umount /tmp/usbboot
You should now have a bootable usb stick. After you boot into the grub
shell you'll need to set up some stuff. I don't remember all of it I think
but let me try:
##################################
root (hd0,0)/
kernel /huge.s
initrd /initrd.img
boot
##################################
Your slack setup should now boot, from now on you can continue as
described in the README_USB.TXT, create some partitions, run setup,
mount slackware CD or DVD,...
--- for reference ----------------------------------------------------
This site has helped me the most with making USB bootable:
http://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/Default.aspx?pageid=45
-----------------------------------------
Hope this will be usefull.
