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Run Off A Linux Distro From A Bootable USB Drive

Jun 2, 2007 1 comments
Okies as i promised a post on Linux . There are so many rumors about Linux. People say that it will not support your hardware and some say that it is for the geeks . What better way to find out than use for yourself . Even if you find it inconvenient to install Linux in your HDD there are live CD available in which you can boot into Linux from the CD or DVD itself . I feel that optical media are not that reliable and and is really slow. But the Linux distro can even run from any USB media like your flash drive. There is a Linux distro Feather Linux (USB Linux) that is dedicated to running Linux in USB devices. But many other distro can be run using some tweaks. This will teach how to run DSL (Damn Small Linux) in a bootable USB drive of size larger than 64 MB .

1) Format your pen drive in fat32 (FORMAT I: /fs:FAT3)

2) Download the dsl-embeded.zip from http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html (DSL is one of the smallest linux distro and is just 49 MB download)

3)Unzip the DSL file to your pen drive

4)Download Syslinux for windows from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/ (Note that you download syslinux for windows as there are also versions for other OS'es )

5) Go to a command prompt and run syslinux for your drive from \win32\syslinux.exe (SYSLINUX I:)

6) Now reboot and you are ready to go

***** Check out you BIOS option for booting from USB . Some older Motherboard may not support booting from USB.

Comments

Anonymous said…
pls be warned that if you got 256 mb /1GB i.e. more than 64MB capacity of thumbdrive then after installing syslinux on the pendrive it will show only 64 MB the rest will be hidden somewhere. I Had the similar the problem while installing syslinux on my 256 mb flashdrive and i some how managed to get it back to 256mb.

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