[svlug] "dd" first CD image to USB pendrive for booting?

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:12:00 -0800, Bill-Schoolcraft wrote:

> I've done some gOOgling and there is alot of mention to DSL, Slax etc
> but nothing to more or less address what I'm trying to do...

For good reason: Those distros have addressed this very task, and SUSE has
not.

> (question)
> Am I missing something core to this process in terms of the legacy
> bootstrap process or?

Perhaps you are not aware of the structure of the iso filesystem you tried
to dd to the pendrive, specifically as it pertains to booting. The
eltorito specification was designed for booting DOS. As a result, every CD
bootable on i386 contains one or more floppy images embedded inside the
iso. Machines that are able to boot from pendrives typically ignore the
MBR altogether (but not all do), and just load the boot sector from
/dev/sda1. You could just fill sda1 with the contents of the floppy image,
but then you'd have nowhere to put the contents of the rest of the iso.
Theoretically, you could split the iso among two pendrives, but there's no
way a SUSE image will look for the second one on /dev/sdb1, so this goes
right back to the distro question. Ubuntu also addresses this issue, but
in a considerably more versatile (read: less user-friendly) manner than
DSL or Slax. In addition to the "cdrom" installer, Ubuntu offers the
"hd-media" installer, and the "netboot" installer. If you were installing
Ubuntu (and not Kubuntu or Xubuntu, either), you could just dd the
hd-media installer onto the pendrive. Did this for a laptop that had no CD
drive and no floppy drive, and it worked perfectly.

Oops, as I was typing the above, it seems somebody else already told you
pretty much the same thing. However, it doesn't seem like you were told
how to apply this information to exactly what you intend to do, i.e.
install SUSE: Put the individual files and folders that are on the iso
onto a FAT filesystem on /dev/sda1 using cp, and install the syslinux
bootloader into its boot sector. After properly configuring the bootloader
(which, depending on what SUSE used, may consist of nothing more than
renaming a single file), you will have a ready-to-go SUSE "mini-network"
USB stick. With 1GB devices, you will also have plenty of room left over
for many other uses of the pendrive.