"Burning" and ISO image to USB drive

[Robert E. Butts]

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 20:15 -0400, Robert E. Butts wrote:
> 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.

Bad form to reply to one's own post, but I need to correct a stupid
error.  The recommended menu.lst file should look like this

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

Or, you could keep the earlier menu.lst, and just create a boot
directory and stick the iso, the kernel, and the initrd.img in there ..
My apologies for the boo-boo