[Nottingham] bootable cd to flash drive/sd card

[Tony Shaw]

Martin wrote:
> 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
>
>   
Thanks for the help, I am going to try my Mandriva Move 2009.0 iso file 
first just to see it it works & then if it does I can then go on to try 
and install Mandriva 2009.0 its self via an 8gb flash drive.

Tony Shaw
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/nottingham/attachments/20091020/3fec2ff9/attachment.htm