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By kniwor at 2006-04-17 00:26
After I got my Removable USB-Hard Disk I wanted to boot from it.

Finally got it working. Here's how. I will try to keep this as short as possible. And yes... this is written considering that new users may want to boot from USB.

These are the things I used. It should work for pendrives also and should work for any other Linux distribution.

Tools

My 40Gb USB Hard Disk

Slax 5.1.0

Syslinux Utility

Method

First I made a 256Mb FAT16 partition on my HDD. Let us call this partition X:\
Set the X:\ partition to be active
Right click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management.
(you can make the partition here and set it active)

Now extract the SLAX iso image in the newly created X:\ using Winrar
then copy the files "vmlinuz" and "initrd.gz" which are in the X:\boot directory to X:\ - this means to copy them one level up

Then open the file isolinux.cfg in wordpad and remove boot\ ahead of vmlinuz and initrd: so, where there is "boot\vmlinuz" it becomes "vmlinuz" and wherever there is "boot\initrd" it becomes "initrd"
(You can use the "replace all" function in Wordpad to do this instead of looking for them individually in case you miss anything)
Save the file as syslinux.cfg

Extract the syslinux zip file somewhere and then open the command prompt
cd into the syslinux directory
cd once again to the win32 directory
then run
Code:
win32:\> syslinux.exe X: -f
Reboot and Enter the BIOS (usually pressing [del] or [F1] at the time of boot)
Set the USB device as primary boot device.
Reboot and if everything was done properly it should boot from the USB drive.

This assumes that your BIOS will allow you to boot from a USB device.


  



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