[Wylug-help] External USB Disk

[Towle, William]

>= Gary Stainburn
> On Thursday 29 October 2009 10:21:51 Towle, William wrote:
> >   I can definitely recommend the latter: all my SSDs are FAT and
> > ext2 partitioned, with GrUB as the boot loader and the Tiny Core
> > Linux kernel and initrd (only 10MB!) ready to give any machine
> > one or more sane shells as required.
> 
> What do I need to do to set up a Linux bootable memory stick 
> as you describe.

  I picked Tiny Linux specifically because the filesystem is
entirely self-contained in the ramdisk, so for distros with a
partition-encapsulated root filesystem whatever steps their
wiki/installer walks through is advised ... but the outline
for doing this from scratch runs along the following lines
(adapted from http://www.angelfire.com/linux/wills/grub.html,
originally written in 2003):

1. Prime the card with an appropriate partition scheme and
create filesystems. Note that GrUB has 'root', 'makeactive',
and 'chainloader' runtime commands to handle proprietary OS
boot loaders and their expectation partitions will be marked
bootable. See mkdosfs guides re '-F' (msdosfs FAT size) if
applicable.

2. Install GrUB to the MBR of the card. You have a choice of
using the 'grub-install' wrapper and the same full interpreter
as the boot loader provides with 'grub'; this adds the
"stage 1.5" files and configures device.map.
  Here, 'grub' is useful if 'grub-install' fails with
"[devicename] does not have any corresponding BIOS drive".
Advance preparation of /boot/grub/{stage1,stage2,menu.lst} may
be necessary.

3. Transfer kernels, initrds, etc (I used a loopback mount to
cannibalise Tiny Core's ISO image; for old schoolers the
poorly-documented 'mcopy' "-i" argument and the "::" drive may
be useful) to the card as necessary, add appropriate preamble
and stanzas to /boot/grub/menu.lst, and that's pretty much it.
Some additional examples from my current setup follow:

title TinyCore
	kernel /boot/bz_tc11.lx
	initrd /boot/rfs_tc11.gz
	append base

title	Linux (EeePC HDD)
	root (hd1,0)
	kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.4-eeepc quiet rw vga=785 irqpoll
i8042.noloop=1 root=/dev/sda1
	initrd /boot/initramfs-eeepc.img

title	memtest
	kernel /boot/memtest.bin

# FreeDOS ODIN 0.7 (InfoCom HHGTTG FTW!)
# see http://odin.fdos.org/odin2005/

title FreeDOS odin0.7 (1440K version, via memdisk)
	kernel /boot/memdisk/memdisk
	initrd /boot/odin1440.img.gz


W.