On Tuesday, October 06, 2009 at 03:28PM -0400, Eben King wrote:
> In a while (days/weeks) I'll build a machine.[1] It'll have USB ports
> and presumably the ability to boot from a USB hard drive (which I have)
> but it probably won't have a {C,DV}D drive and I don't have a USB {C,DV]D
> drive. So: what do I need to do to the USB hard drive besides make it
> bootable to allow installing some flavor of Linux from it? Or will it be
> easier to yank out the new machine's hard drive (actually an IDE->CF
> adapter) and take it to a machine that _does_ have an optical drive? If
> I do that I foresee problems in naming drives.
>
> Plus, it's a 16G card. Yeah, don't use swap, I know. I either need to
> use X or some console mp3 player with large enough type to read from
> across the room. I would prefer not to use X if I can avoid it.
> Resource hog, etc. Any suggestions?
Step 1: find a usb stick , 512M would be a good size.
Step 2: Download hd-media for lenny[1]
Step 3: copy to the USB stick, which is probably /dev/sdb or so:
% zcat boot.img.gz | sudo dd if=/dev/stdin of=/dev/sdb
Step 4: Mount the disk (I usually use /mnt for this)
% sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt
Step 5: Download a debian netinst IS[2],
copy it into /mnt, with an 8 + 3 filename:
% cp debian-503-i386-netinst.iso /mnt/debian.iso
Step 6: unmount /mnt
% umount /mnt
You now have a bootable usb stick which the BIOS will see as either a
usb-floppy or usb-cdrom (I forget).
If your BIOS only supports USB-HDD booting (like my lenovo x300) then
you will need to go through a little bit more work...
References:
[1] http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
[2] http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/5.0.3/i386/iso-cd/debian-503-i386-netinst.iso
--
Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink
that they may live.
-- Socrates
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