GRUB: Booting from USB; Creating the Ultimate Bootable USB Stick
 

Ok, so last week I was sick for a few days, and spent my down time working on creating a bootable USB flash drive with GRUB on it. Most everything is working great, but there's a few things I haven't figured out yet. To start out, here's my menu.lst:
(Yes, I cheated and got the netinstalls from the Billix .iso ;).)

Now, here's the ones that don't work:
Gparted
ALL Debian LiveCDs
DSL
Win XP Pro Installer
Win XP Recovery Console

Gparted and the Debian LiveCDs are the most important; I haven't tried to get the windows stuff working yet (I just guessed at what those entries should look like).

Anything obvious I'm missing? It seems to be only the LiveCDs I'm having trouble with... I'll report the exact error messages later. (I know the kernel/initrd paths are correct; I get errors from Linux during startup.)

Also, any more knowledge about GRUB in general is much appreciated; I'm aware I may have extra "root (hd0,0)" lines etc. in there.

OK

a couple pointers

1) you cant "hide" the debian live stuff inder alot of folders
the initrd gos looking for a folder named "live"

You should therefore edit the initrd for each debian based system
it's pretty easy

Basically, create a folder named "tree", cd into folder tree and open the initrd with cpio

assuming initrd.gz is in folder with tree folder
now, the initrd is uncompressed in tree folder
look in folder scripts and open the script "live" as root with text editor
it looks like this, just the top part
editable parts are LIVE_MEDIA_PATH="live" and
root_persistence="live-rw"
home_persistence="home-rw"
root_snapshot_label="live-sn"
home_snapshot_label="home-sn"

dont change the mountpoint (mountpoint="/live/image")

you need to make each LIVE_MEDIA_PATH= different for debian live and gparted

so, for example; change the older debian live path to
LIVE_MEDIA_PATH="old"

and new to
LIVE_MEDIA_PATH="new"

if running persistent you also need to change the live-rw to whatever
root_persistence="old-rw"

I never use these
you can use any names you want, just dont make them very long

to edit the other initrds just make them .gz's instead of .img

then do the above to them

so, your new grub menu.lst may be like


you also need to put proper kernel line boot parameters
see here
Boot Parameters for Debian Live
and heres the debian live persistence stuff
http://live.debian.net/manual/html/persistence.html


so, check that out and see if you have any more issues:)

Wow, I envy your level of understanding!

Well, so far I've managed to get that far, I've edited the live script with the correct path. Now instead of being dumped into a shell, I get a kernel panic and no init found. I have a hunch that it may have something to do with the filesystem.squashfs, but that's just me. I've spent hours working on this but haven't been able to get any further. I noticed there's a 'run-init' file in /bin, and tried using init=/bin/run-init, as well as several other things, but that didn't work either. What's the next step?