"Burning" and ISO image to USB drive

[Robert E. Butts]

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 15:53 -0400, Anthony Yarusso wrote:
> I'd like to know how I can do the equivalent of burning a CD, but to
> something other than a CD.  Ultimately, I want to take my external hard
> drive, partition it, and have one partition be an installation I can use
> (easy), and the second be essentially an Ubuntu install disk, so that I
> can use it to install on other people's computers while I'm carrying
> this thing around.  How can I extract the disk image to accomplish that?
> 

I've done something similar, but I have to warn you .. with very limited
success.  

I'd proceed like this:

1) Download Grub for DOS.  It is an excellent program.  (Google for it)
Read the extensive readme 

2) If the OS on your first primary is Windows XP, you may not have to
mess with the MBR.  The following steps assume that it is:

3) Extract the file grldr from the Grub for DOS archive, and place it
into the root directory of your XP primary partition

4) Open boot.ini and add the following line:
C:\grldr=Install Ubuntu

5) Copy your Ubuntu 6.06 iso to your second primary partition.  You'll
need to mount that ISO and extract the kernel and initrd.img files.
These go into the root directory with the ISO, and they must be in the
same directory

6) Create your menu.lst file, which would look something like this (this
is very rough; the Grub for DOS readmes will have much better examples)

title		Install Ubuntu
root		(hd1,1)
kernel		/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb2  vga=791
initrd		/boot/initrd.img
boot

The values in the above stanza assume that your external hard drive will
be the second IDE, and that your Ubuntu image is on the second primary.
You'll have to adjust them if they aren't correct here.

7) So, if everything goes as planned, here's what happens:

1) Plug the external HD into the PC
2) Adjust the BIOS to boot from it
3) Boot XP
4) Choose Install Ubuntu
5) Grub appears with another option to Install Ubuntu
6) Press enter, the ram disk initializes and you're off

A possible variation on this that I have not tried is to copy the Grub
for DOS files to a floppy and boot from that.  

Don't know if any of this has been helpful, but it might put you onto
something that will work for you.