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How to make a bootable USB pendrive

Here are the commands I used to make
a pendrive with installed /boot linux partition
the Debian based distro used GRUB.
You can copy the full system on the pendrive ( without /sys and /proc)
but I needed only /boot , as I used it to start linux distro on HD.

First it was a regular linux system installed on HD (/dev/hda4).
Then after plugging pendrive was recognized as /dev/sda.

Fdisk formats pendrive then need to make ext3 partition
and copy /boot directory to USB.


#fdisk/dev/sda p d n- create partition a- set boot flag w- save # umount /dev/sda1 # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 # mount /dev/hda4 /boot # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot # cp -ax /boot/* /mnt/boot



Then on USB disc I needed to change two files,first:
/mnt/boot/grub/device.map
because system starts from USB , pendrive has to be the first one.
I swapped hda with sda
(hd0) /dev/sda
(hd1) /dev/hda
and second :
menu.lst, somewhere within change to
# groot=(hd0,0) kernel~(0,0)
finally the last command writes info to pendrive's MBR
# grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

With LILO the lilo.conf looks like :

boot = /dev/sda prompt map = /mnt/sda1_removable/map.lilo timeout = 20 bitmap=/mnt/sda1_removable/boot/splash.bmp change-rules #bmp-colors=<fg>,<bg>,<sh>,<hfg>,<hbg>,<hsh> reset vga = 0x317 image = /mnt/sda1_removable/boot/vmlinuz initrd=/mnt/sda1_removable/boot/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 label = bt append="max_loop=255 init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444 rw"

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