Create a bootable partition on a USB disk

[Andrew Farris]

On Fri, 2009-09-04 at 16:17 -0400, Fred Roller wrote:
[snip]
> Andrews suspicions' are correct.  I reformatted my drive to ntfs.  The 
> USB Start Up Disk Creator *did* see the disk at first with a requirement 
> to format.  Once I clicked the format button the software immediately 
> changed to requiring me to insert a usb stick. 
> 
> That said...we know your system can see the drive (i will assume it is 
> /dev/sdc) so we will bypass the start up disk software and just run dd 
> to create the drive.
> 
> 
>       Command Line Interface
> 
>    1. Download the desired .img file
>    2. Open a terminal and insert your flash media
>    3.
> 
>       Look at the output of dmesg | tail -20 to determine the device
>       node assigned to your flash media (ignore the device number; e.g.
>       /dev/sdb, not sdb1)
> 
>    4.
> 
>       Run sudo umount /dev/device/node
> 
>    5.
> 
>       Run sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/device/node bs=1M
> 
>    6. Remove your flash media when the command completes (you may need
>       to wait a few extra seconds for it to finish)
> 
> which comes from:
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles
> 
> Another possibility, which makes more sense if this drive will only be 
> used on one machine.  Install from CD and choose the USB drive as the 
> destination hard drive.
> 
> Fred

Actually... could you not just boot with an installCD on whatever system
you want, choose the install location as the USB drive's partition, then
also choose install GRUB onto that partition? My thinking is that this
method would leave any existing installs on the PC alone, and produce a
regular desktop install with the grub bootloader on the USB drive.

Or is this idea completely wrong?


-- 
Andrew
_____________________________
Registered Linux User: 473690
Registered Ubuntu User: 22747