[Nottingham] bootable cd to flash drive/sd card

[Martin]

Tony Shaw wrote:
[---]
> up and died so we need a way of installing Linux on to it with out using 
> a cd/dvd. The laptop has both usb ports and an sd card slot, the bios 
> says that it should  be able to boot from a flashdrive. Thanks for any 

You can certainly boot Linux from a USB memory stick if your BIOS 
supports booting from USB.

For Mandriva, they now cleverly contrive a 'hybrid' iso that can be 
burnt to a CD/DVD and also the same image can be "dd"-ed directly onto a 
USB memory stick (or even any hdd).

Try:

http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free

Download whichever iso and then:

dd if=whatever_mandriva.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

where "X" is whatever letter is assigned to your USB drive, for example 
/dev/sdb

You want the entire device so don't worry about any of the partition 
numbers (such as /dev/sdX1, /dev/sdX2, etc). The bs=1M is important to 
get a good write speed onto your memory stick.

Note that you can't do that trick with all "iso"s. The dd will work, but 
you need the iso format to be right which is what Mandriva has contrived.

That may well work on a sd/mmc flashdrive, again if your BIOS supports that.


Do any of the other distros offer hybrid "iso"s now?

Good luck,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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