Replacing floppy with flash drive for dual boot

jogger · 03-21-2005, 05:09 PM

Creating a Windows XP / Linux dual boot machine using a floppy to boot to Linux is easy enough, but...

Is there any way to use a USB flash drive instead of a floppy diskette to start booting to Linux already installed in one of the system's drive/partitions?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jogger

WhatsHisName · 03-22-2005, 10:53 AM

You need to write the first 512 bytes of the boot partition to the USB drive. A minor variation of this approach is often used to create a boot file usable in WinXP boot.ini to boot linux.

I will use one of my systems as an example.

-The boot partition is /dev/sda6.
-The USB drive is /dev/sdc, which I looked up in /etc/fstab on my FC3 system after the drive was automounted as a vfat partition (/media/whatever).

-Using dd:

dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1

This works fine on my test system, but I have had trouble with this approach on some systems.

Remember to reconfigure your BIOS to boot from the USB drive.