[ale] Thumb drive games

aaron aaron at pd.org
Wed Jan 14 01:11:36 EST 2009


On 2009, Jan, 14, , at 12:15 AM, tom wrote:
>
> I purchased an 8 gig thumbdrive to experiment with using one as a boot
> disk for a new eeepc900? (I think I got that model right).
>
> In any event, making a bootable thumb drive turned into an adveenture.

Both Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 9 include utilities to install onto
a bootable USB drive.  Learned this from last month's Linux
Format cover article, plus Brian Pitts made an Ubuntu USB key
(in less than 10 minutes) as his Pecha Kucha presentation at
December's ALE Central solstice celebration.

On a system with Ubuntu 8.10 installed, it's a menu item
System // Administration // Create USB Startup Disk
Only other thing you'll need is a an ISO of an Ubuntu Live
CD available to the system (or have your 8.10 Live install
CD in the drive).

Fedora 9 has a standalone utility written Python & QT that can be
used to create a bootable USB install from either a Linux system
or a WinDisease box, possible from an intel Mac as well. Again,
only other thing you need is an ISO of the a Fedora Live CD.
I expect the utility is still included in Fedora 10, too.


> Just like typing on this eeepc is. I had noticed on some web sites  
> that
> some thumb drives are not suitable for use as boot disks, but not a  
> word
> about why. I think I know at least one reason - some person/idiot  
> added an
> emulated cdrom drive to the San Disk micro cruzer 8 Gig I was  
> using, which
> got seriously in the way of making a bootable disk.
>
> Anybody else run into this kink of idiocy?

Using the Mac disk tools I was unable to remove the (stupid, useless)
auto mount DVD partition on a San Disk USB key last week.  Didn't have
a Linux system at hand, or I might have been able to just fdisk the
thing.  So long as the CD or DVD partition is there it may be impossible
to make the key bootable.

Any other USB key should be workable, though optimally you'll want a
key that is fast and has a high rewrite count.  The main caveate is
that you want to be sure to install a Live CD ISO so that no SWAP
partition ends up on the USB key. If you just directly install a
distro from CD/DVD to a USB key, make sure you update the fstab to
mount /tmp as tmpfs mountpoint:  tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0

HTH!
peace
aaron




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