Server :: Booting From USB Flash Disk?
Jan 6, 2011
For various reasons, when I installed our server, I configured it so that it would boot off a USB flash disk. The flash disk mounts as /boot and / mounts on our RAID array.
It all works very well, but I would like to have backup so that if/when the flash disk goes, I can pop in another one.
I have tried to make copies of the flash disk (using both cp and dd), but it doesn't work. When the server starts its bootup sequence, instead of Linux loading, a cursor starts blinking endlessly.
If I put the original flash in, it works fine. If I put the copy in, it doesn't work.
I can't see any difference between the copy and the original. They seem to have the same content. If I do blkid both have the same label and UUID. The label is /boot, and /etc/fstab refers to this
We are running Scientific Linux 5.4.
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Nov 4, 2010
My DVD drive has gone bad and with new Fedora 14 just launched I decided to install the same through the usb flash disk.
First I used dd: dd if=/home/prabhat/Download/Fedora-14-i386.iso of=/dev/sdb
It went on nicely and copied the iso nicely. But I could not boot with it.
Second time I tried livecd-tools: livecd-iso-to-disk /home/prabhat/Download/Fedora-14-i386.iso /dev/sdb1
It went on nicely, and finally declared something like - usb disk is not live .... But here again when I tried to boot it says MISSING OS. I checked the contents of the flash disk. It contained raw DVD iso image, one images directory, one syslinux directory. I checked the contents of the images directory, and I found it had the install.img. And yes, the /dev/sdb1 is bootable.
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Apr 23, 2010
I want a debian server running dhcp/tftp/pxe containing a tarball of a 'client' debian installation.I want a client that pxe boots, talks to the server, creates a ramdisk, untars the 'client' tarball to the ramdisk and boots into it. Once that's working, I want an NFS map back to the server for the users home directory.Can't find any really helpful howto's... wondering if anyone on here has done this?
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Jan 6, 2011
I am using a linux kernel 2.6.36 using mips architecture. I have succesfully booted the machine through Flash memory, but it is not booting through nfs. It is getting stuck at the stage where the image starts loading. In short the vmlinux.img file is being copied properly to nfsroot but the image is not loading.
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Jan 2, 2010
My dual proc, dual core Opteron MSI Master2FAR motherboard failed, and I try to boot a disk, used on this board as boot disk, on an Intel based Gigabyte GA-965-DS3. Both systems are x86_64 architecture.
The OS is on both systems is openSUSE 11.1.
On booting the disk on the Gigabyte, the disk is seen correctly by the BIOS, but not by the OS, and there is no /dev/sdX; no /dev/disk/... either. I am taken to a login shell from the ramdisk.
When I just mount this disk on the Gigabyte (booted with the Gigabyte's original boot disk) everything seems fine. No suprise to me, since the disk was fine, and was unmounted gracefully and physically taken off the MSI before the board failed.
I think that the cause lies in the fact that the harddisk controller on the Gigabyte is different from the MSI, and the driver for that controller is not available at boot time.
I have two questions:
- is my assumption correct, or is something else going on?
- if I am right, is there a way to get this disk booting on the Gigabyte (or on another system, for that matter)?
You might want to ask why I want to boot this disk on the Gigabyte in the first place, since I can mount it and see all data on it. I have a reason for that, but telling that story would make this topic too long, and it's too off-topic. Most certainly I will get to that in another topic.
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Mar 13, 2010
I ran across this webpage and was just wondering if anyone's tried this before.
[URL]
I've got a spare 1GB lexar jump drive and was thinking of trying it out.
I just wanted to know if a 1GB drive is large enough.
anyone tried a Lexar jump drive before?
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Mar 11, 2010
I have one new laptop that doesn't see one usb bootable device. The usb is a 1G with Mint8 on it that works on plenty of other systems. This is a newer HP laptop core i7 that see's two other flash drives and tries even to boot to my older flash install (only has syslinux no other files) but doesn't show the newer one in bios boot order or boot order choice F9.
It will work correctly under windows so the system does see it.
how to that that single drive to show up in order to boot to it?
Did power down, remove all usb except this one, tried to see if it fell under hard drives instead of usb.
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Jan 13, 2010
How to put ophcrack on linux because of my supposed intentions of plugging it in waiting 20 mins and cracking passwords wherever people do this I know having to waste my space triple booting the thing with Ophcrack XP/Vista and BackTrack. How does one go about dual booting a flash drive? I could not find much on the internet.
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Dec 7, 2010
I recently bought a barebones computer kit and I need an operating system. Upon recommendation, I am considering openSUSE. Further I did not order a disc drive with my computer. This means that to boot openSUSE my only real option would be from a flash drive.
I have found an introduction on how to do it with ubuntu:
Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy Way - How-To Geek
I am interested to know if I can do a similar thing with openSUSE.
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Mar 1, 2010
So I am at my wits end trying to figure out why this won't work. I am trying to install ubuntu 9.10 on my netbook (I hear it runs better than remix) but an running into a wall. I am already using Jolicloud as my main os on my main partition. I have used Unetbootin to get the 9.10 iso on my re-movable media. I have gone into the bios and chose to have it look at the re-movable first, then my 1st partition on the HD. For some reason it never looks at the USB drive. I have disabled everything on boot except for the media and i get a screen that says "insert bootable media or restart" then i have to go back into bios and enable the HD again.
Side note, the media I am using might not be in fat 32 because I haven't figured out how to format in linux but, I have formatted in windows so that it is fat 32 and got the same problem.
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Mar 15, 2010
I have an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer, which reportedly works just fine booting Linux. It does have U3 still present on one of the partitions, but this should not pose any problems either. I also have a 2GB FAT32 partition for storing Windows stuff. The rest (5.7GB) I have reserved for Ubuntu. Windows reports this as an active partition, and the Ubuntu boot CD reports this partition as dev/sdb5. I have installed Ubuntu from the Desktop CD to the USB partition using the guided install (largest continuous free space) and selected the boot (grub) location on the same partition (sdb5), as I'd rather not modify my existing windows bootloader. A 300MB swap partition also exists on the drive. When I attempt to boot the USB drive from either my laptop (Inspiron 1505) or desktop (Abit IP35 Pro), only a blinking dash (or underscore) appears with no LED activity on the flash drive. Could it be that the MBR of the flash drive needs to be aware that the grub install is located at sdb5?
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May 28, 2010
I'm trying to make a sort of "toolkit" flash drive using grub2 but I am running into some problems. For some reason, every entry below gives me the error "you must load the kernel first" when I try to boot it. I have checked in the grub command line and it appears that grub sees my flash drive as the first drive when booting. This is what my grub.cfg looks like.
Code:
#Clonezilla v1.2.5-17
menuentry "Clonezilla 32"
{
set isofile="/boot/isos/clonezilla32.iso"
loopback loop $isofile
[Code]...
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Mar 13, 2011
I want to install a minimal version of linux (probably oS 11.4) onto a partitioned 1TB USB drive to serve as a standalone, bootable restore mechanism for a couple of machines.
First off, is this feasible?
Second, how do I go about it? I was able to install the system to the drive but how do I make that drive bootable? So far, I can't even get it to boot from the grub menu on the first internal hard drive as the system complains loudly about not being able to read disk descriptors and such. I tried the various boot spec (chainloader, menulist, etc) with no luck. Do I need to disconnect all the internal drives then install as if it were the only hard drive in the machine with the DVD reader?
I am assuming that I need some sort of bootstrap code in the MBR of the USB drive to get started but I'm a bit lost here and would appreciate any input, especially from some one who has tried this, before I spend anymore time on it.
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Jan 25, 2011
I'm trying to boot Ubuntu from a CD on a Windows XP Home laptop. The CD was burned correctly; i saw all the files on the disk. I restarted the laptop with the disk installed and all I'm getting is a screen that says Ubuntu with five flashing dots in sequence. Nothing else. It has been running for more than 10 minutes now like this.
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Apr 9, 2011
I'm having trouble using Ubuntu 10.10 (64 bit) to create an installation on a USB (read-write) drive. I've had to use PLOP to boot the system, since I want the usb drive on a high-speed controller, and my machine is such that the on-mainboard USB is slow. So, I put the empty USB (16 GB) on the fast controller, boot from the Ubuntu installation DVD, and install the OS.
Then I switch to booting PLOP, the boot manager, and use it to boot from USB. Everthing works fine, and I can use ubuntu -- but only the first time. Once I shut down, and try to boot again, PLOP doesn't start the boot from the USB drive. It apparently crashes (the star field simulator doesn't continue). It does try to (at least) load the USB drivers, but stalls without finding the USB boot medium (my flash drive).
Anyone have any idea what's happening? Also let me know if there might be a more trusted way to boot from the high-speed USB drive (like, it would be great if the installation disk had an option to install the USB drivers and then do a secondary boot). Plop is nice because it can be on read-only storage (a DVD or CD) and
so can't be corrupted after the fact.
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Aug 21, 2011
Is there any way of being able to access data/files from a disk with Ubuntu operating system on it with another disk running Ubuntu? Don't worry, I'll give an example of what I mean, haha. For example, I used to use hard disk 1 as my main drive with the Ubuntu operating system on it. I removed that drive a long time ago and am now using hard disk 2 with Ubuntu on it. Is there any way that I can just retrieve files from hard disk 1 without having to boot into it, ie, treat hard disk 1 like a data drive and be able to copy and paste files from there onto my now main drive, hard disk 2?
If possible, would the process be more complicated if hard disk 1 used a password to log in?
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Jan 25, 2010
I'm trying to get it on my own computer at home to work on. I have an iMac, and I also have a disc with Fedora on it (along with sabayon and slax and a few others). I tried booting my computer from the disc, but when I got to the localhost login bit, I couldn't get any further. I have searched for this query already, but seemingly all the answers assume that it was installed beforehand. I haven't installed anything, just put in the disc and changed the settings to 'boot from disc' before restarting the computer. Am I missing something? Also as a separate query, how do I partition the hard drive so I can run Fedora alongside Leopard? And what is the story with virtual machines?
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Jun 18, 2010
"In this tutorial you will prepare a USB flash drive to make it bootable. After you booted it it shows you a menu where you can choose which live system you want to boot. So you might be interested in this tutorial if: You want to have multiple live systems on one USB flash drive In the future you want to create a new bootable live system just by copying the ISO file onto the drive and edit the grub.cfg You don't want to or can't use Distro specific LiveUSB creator tools You prefer a cleaner solution than the most LiveUSB creator tools which create several folders and files at the device root You are feeling bored and want to see cool features of Grub2 If you have a Grub2 version with Lua support you even don't need to manually edit the grub.cfg when you add new or remove live systems." Remainder of information is found here: [URL] This was found in a closed Karmic Development forum - can this be validated and updated if needed for Lucid?
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Feb 18, 2011
I probably have not done any serious programming for 20 years, not counting a little HTML.
I stumbled onto an old FREESPIRE disk my bro sent me several years back -- and tried installing it on a Sony Vaio PCG FRV 28 I had crashed a few years back. The Sony bios is still aboard, but old enough to not have USB "booting" as part of the boot menu. I don't even know if one can easily hack into the BIOS on an old sony Vaio but changing the BIOS would solve lot of problems.
Does anyone have any ideas or certain knowledge on rewriting or modifying the Master Boot Code or an idea on making my USB [with Ubuntu or any other Linux implementation visible] and bootable to the bios on powerup?
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Jul 2, 2010
I have a little/big problem. This morning, I dont know why, but suddently my hard disk was full. I thougt that the temporary space grew too mucho and I thought if I restart my machine, everything would be nice but no. Now in the logging screen comes messages that some components cant be load and so I can't go in my Fedora
I tried to access to my partition with Knoppix-livecd and free some space, but it seems that Knoppix can't access to that partition. I have installed fedora 12.
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Jan 19, 2011
I have been using Fedora 13 for about 3 and a half months now maybe more and i have made the decision to switch back to windows. It is not that i have any complaints about Fedora but trying to get vent to work has been an uphill battle and i like to try many diffrent games and Fedora is just not compatible with all the games i would like to play, anyway my problem is that i cannot boot from the windows install disk i have it just loads Fedora no matter what i do.
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May 11, 2010
I have a working dell deminsions, no problems 2gb of ram, all that good stuff running xp.I have an older HP Pavilion with about 1Gb of ram, running windows 98. There were some issues with the partitions and registries and i want to install Linux over it to fix all issues and make it a working computer again.I burnt the ISO as an image on a cd using, Nero. no problems with the cd. I could not get the Hp to recognize the cd, and it wont boot. So i took the HDD out of the HP and put it into my dell. I can get to the Install part of the setup and that's where it goes to just a black screen with a flashing cursor.I am considering, booting to XP and reformatting the disk, and trying to install it using the HP again.
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Jul 19, 2010
I have newly installed Ubuntu 10.04 lts. Everytime when I am boot my system, Ubuntu try to check my harddisk. I am stopping that by pressing "c" key.Why it is so? anything problem with my hard disk or I need to disable anything for avoiding it for everytime?
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May 24, 2009
i had installed fedora and windows on my internal Harddisk earlier,then tried to install fedora on external USB hard disk,now my computer failed to boot from internal hard disk,when i unplugged the hard disk.
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Apr 28, 2010
I have 2 IDE drives, Windows XP is on the Master drive & Fedora 12 is on a partition the other drive. I purposely installed the Linux boot loader on the same drive as Fedora because want to use NTLDR as the primary boot loader. According to a guide I found [URL], I should be able to copy the Linux boot sector to a file & put that copy on the Windows drive & then modify boot.ini, so I am prompted to with an OS choice a startup.
The problem is the command the guide gives to copy the Linux boot sector (dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=bootsect.lnx size=512 count=1) has outdated syntax and does not work. What syntax would make this command work in Fedora 12? Another guide I found ([URL]-vista-already) suggested using: Grub4Dos & modifying boot.ini. This method almost worked until grub gave an error that there was no kernel loaded. What would I type into the grub prompt to load the kernel? How would I automate the loading of the kernel, so I don't have to specify the kernel each time?
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Nov 18, 2010
I'm an experienced Linux developer who has run into a little problem. I'm using a National Instruments 8170 chassis, among the normal ports, it has a FDD and USB port but this model does not allow booting from a USB CDROM ( I tried a BIOS update, that didn't help either ). I made this cool customized 550MB FC8 LiveCD wtih X, GCC, various apps, etc. and a kernel 2.6.30 & 2.6.18 boot floppy disk with all the needed drivers. The floppy boots to a shell with all the busybox utils, etc. and detects the USB CDROM media and all its files.
My Question is: How do I get the kernel and initrd on the Live CD to start or boot after booting from the Floppy disk ?, I mean, I want to load linux again but this time from the CD after booting linux from floppy, if that makes sense. I'm just using the floppy to boot and recognize the USB CDROM. This can be done with MSDOS and loadlin but loadlin has an issue(it hangs) with the newer kernels (2.6.18 and greater). I searched for the loadlin source code to port it to linux but was unable to find it on the net.
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May 23, 2011
I have been trying everything to install flash player on Ubuntu 11.04, I've done everything and it wont work. Tried Downloading it from adobe, that ..... redirects me to, tried the source in the software centre, tried installing it through the terminal.
It either won't add the source or asks me for my install disk, when that is in the drive it keeps asking like it isn't (but it is mounted ect)Any one know a terminal command or way to fix this.
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Nov 12, 2010
I am a ubuntu user and I tried to install ubuntu on my sister's netbook too. The problem is that the netbook has a broadcom wi-fi n that is not supported by linux for now because I searched for drivers and other stuff an I found that it is not supported. After that I tried to format the disk and reinstall windows 7 but the problem is that the installation procedure gives me this error: "windows cannot be installed on this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enable in the computer's bios menu."
I tried to do all the things that are described here: [URL] but it's still not working.
Obviously when I format the drive with ubuntu and I put it in the netbook it's not working, it stops at the logo and the only thing I can do is entering BIOS.
I formated the drive with a windows os and then the pc makes the boot from usb but the problem persit...I still can't install because of that error :"windows cannot be installed on this disk. This computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk's controller is enable in the computer's bios menu."
Before installing ubuntu the sistem had kaspersky antivirus and detected 1 Trojan, it could be that a virus destroyed the bootsect...I don't think so.
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May 8, 2011
I have successfully migrated my linux install to a new /, /home, /boot partition on my ssd. Everything works fine, except that it won't make the root directory on the right disk. When I change the root=uuid=<drive id> to my new drive everything is fine, but I can't automate that... in other words I have manually typed the uuid of my root-partition for about 100 times now and I am fed up with that how I can save the uuid of my new drive in the startup parameters?
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Nov 22, 2009
how to get a working bootable USB boot disk for DOS using Fedora 12. I needed the dos boot disk to flash my motherboard BIOS as it did not support linux for updating the bios. Thought I'd put the steps involved to help other people who wanted to do something similar. The steps outlined here are for a Fedora 12 system. You should be able to extrapolate the minor changes that may be required for other linux distributions. All commands listed below to be typed in on a command prompt, logged in as root. Here goes...
1. Prerequisites:
syslinux
testdisk
freedos base cd (http://www.freedos.org/)
[code]....
Acknowledgments:
1. [URL] for enlightening me on the fact that testdisk could be used instead of install-mbr
2. [URL] upon which this howto is broadly based.
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