Ubuntu :: Booting Live CD ISOs From USB Flash Drive With Grub2
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?
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.
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?
I was given an external USB drive which has Windows XP Pro on the first partition. I can mount and access the partition with no problem. When I run update-grub, it finds the XP partition and creates a menu entry for it. But when I select it from the Grub menu, I get an error that the device is not found.
Results of sudo fdisk -l Code: Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00086c27
Can someone tell me how to do this? I just formatted a slaved drive for EXT4 and now I'd like to write grub over the MBR. Cannot really find much on Google. tried: grub-install /dev/sda1 and of course didn't work....
Is there a way to install grub2 from a linux live cd when linux isn't installed on any of the partitions? I'm setting up a multiboot partition for someone and I don't want to install linux anywhere on the computer since hard drive space is running short.
If an old bios and mainboard is being used, such that it cannot handle the large size of HD, then is it useful to say use a live CD and from its initial menu (pressed a key), choose 'Boot From First Hard Disk'? Would this be similar in getting around a bios and disk size limitation I wonder - like - does the use of a live CD in this way avoid using the bios to point to the active partition??
The reason for asking is that a friend has a couple of quality old rack mounted server machines and wants to use Ubuntu having now fitted 80 GB empty drives. Live CD seems ok, and 11.04 install goes ok but on boot up grub comes back with an error.
I recall that early machines cannot see larger(?) HDs for booting purposes even though installs go ok in very large HDs. I wondered if a live CD to boot up temporarily - trouble shooting - would be worth trying for this reason, or am I way off?
I have a dual boot machine with WinXP/Linux Mint on it. I am looking to erase both of them and put up Ubuntu 11.04.
I have chosen to go with a live USB install for this. The live USB boots fine and everything seems usable. However, when I tried to install it would tell me that I do not have 4GB available for the install which seemed a bit weird since I have a 160GB Maxtor HDD.
After digging around a bit I realized that the system does not see my hard drive. Running fdisk -l would only show the USB drive that I am booting from and not the main HDD.
I tried to have a look in /dev to see if my HDD is there and not mounted. But aside from sda which is the USB I did not find an sdb or hd entry.
Has anyone encountered a similar problem while trying to install Ubuntu 11.04?
P.S.: The HDD works fine, I can see it in BIOS and in the other 2 OS-es that I have installed.
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.
I wanted to keep kon-boot and ubuntu live on USB drives instead of CDs for the ease of carrying around. I wonder if its at all possible to put both tools on same USB drive instead of keeping them on two separate ones?
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.
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.
I just tried Centos 5.2 Live starting from a 2 GB USB flash drive. Everything seems to run fine, fast, stable - except for that the persistent feature is not working. I created the USB from Windows using the Centos 5.2 LiveCD image and the current version of Live USB Creator (3.7), and declared a 256 MB persistent space.
This persistence feature had worked before with Fedora 11 but the system resulted unstable, kernel panic.... Now Centos has been solid for hours in a row... but the file where persistence should be reflected remains untouched with the initial creation timestamp. When rebooting, every change in config, file created etc gets lost.
I want to run Debian as a live version from my USB flash drive. Does this provide the same amount of security from hackers as installing Debian as the only OS on my netbook. Windows ce would still be on my netbook?
I have made several live Cd's and img for my flash drive and tried to even preview Ubuntu before install, but nothing seems to be working. it makes it to the screen that says Ubuntu with the dots and the dots "cycle" then afew seconds later, weather cd or flash drive, everything just stops and my computer freezes. Tried nomodeset and everything i could find between here and google to no avail.
cant get past that load screen. Ive been lurking on the forum for days and finally got fed up enough to post this because im fresh and have no clue what im doing when it comes to this. all i know is i want something better than windows(lol) and Ubuntu seems like its right up my alley...user, my "skills" if you will, are better than most, but Linux.its like trying to reed Greek for me.Also, computer specs...Toshiba A505-S6025 4gb Memory Nvidia GeForce 310M (from what i read i will have trouble with this) Realtek RTL8191SE wlan (also will have problems with this)
EDIT: just ran live cd with virtual box and it started the demo of Ubuntu with no problem with no options(like nomodeset) checked off... apparently i think im doing something wrong when it comes to booting the other way...
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.
I am trying to install Debian Live to a 4 GB flash drive. I am using UNetBootin to extract this (debian-live-6.0.1-i386-gnome-desktop.iso) file to a FAT32 partition on my flash drive. It installs fine, and shows me the SysLinux menu fine, but when i choose live(or anything else) it says"Invalid or Corrupt Kernel Image". I also tryed these other installers. pendrivelinux's Universal USB Installer. It gives me the same message. win32diskimager gives me a different Debian menu, but the same problem. Does anyone know what is wrong, and how to fix it. It is driving me nuts!
I installed Kubuntu 8.04.2 Live CD on a USB flash drive using a software program called Unetbootin (from Gentoo), and I can successfully boot into the OS with no problem but I am not able to save any changes such as preferences, because once I reboot, everything I changed or installed is lost. I guess this is because the OS is dumped into RAM and all of my changes were made in RAM instead of the USB flash drive.
My question would be is there a way (keeping my present configuration) I can save any changes to the USB flash drive so that when I reboot, the changes will stick?
i initilally installed ubuntu 9.10 then installed windows 7 ,then i recovered grub2 using livecd as told in the post [URL] i did "sudo update-grub" and got windows 7 menu entry but when i select that entry windows 7 does not load but the grub2 is reloaded again. i cant boot to windows 7.
Windows 7 have 100 mb partition "System Reserved" the grub2 points to that partition but still windows 7 not loaded.
sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x3c3a81f5
I'm just wondering if the method for installing to a regular drive would work for a flash drive, and still be portable? I know I could use a live usb, but I want a real installation for diagnostics and such (and just to have it). I need to be able to use Wine, as some of the utilities and programs I want to use are Windows only. I know I can just install it on the flash drive, but I just don't know if it'll work on other computers. Obviously I would be using the x86 install, not the AMD64 for maximum compatibility, and I would use 9.10 for now.
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?
I installed Fedora 15, which was my first real departure from Debian based Linux OSs. I absolutely love the new Gnome 3, and was able to configure F15 to work as I wanted it to. On rebooting I realized that there was no boot loader screen, that F15 just booted and didn't give me a choice as to which OS I wanted to use. Eventually I was able to configure grub to let me see the boot loader and added my old boot loader as a choice. This worked well, maybe not a perfect solution, but it worked. This weekend I installed LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) to another HDD. LMDE uses grub2 and after the install F15 was not recognized.
Two questions: Is there a way for grub2 to see F15? or Can F15 be installed using grub2? I really don't mind re-installing from scratch.
Ubuntu 10.04.1 to prepare a USB flash drive for use as installation media for a new computer that's on the way. When the Linux kernel tries booting up on the flash drive, I get an error saying VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(8,1).Here's how I got to this point...Created bootable partition on the thumb drive.Put the following files onto the flash drive: initrd.gz, vmlinuz, and ubuntu-10.04.1-server-amd64.iso fromhttp://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dis...ages/hd-media/Install Grub2 to the drive via grub-install.Put the following into boot/grub/grub.cfg:
I am in a situation to boot fedora 15 live cd in to command line mode, not graphical mode, for some testing purpose. how to change argument during booting mode
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.
Small issue with grub 2. I installed fedora on a usb drive and i'm trying to get it to boot from grub 2. I did update-grub and it found the kernel on /dev/sdd2 but for some reason it is trying to point the kernel file to /boot directory in grub but the kernel is on the usb drive and when i try to set it to look at the usb drive it says file not found.
So I install Ubuntu 10.10 on a multi-drive, dual boot with windows 7 computer. At almost the end of the install, I see "running grub-install sda" or whatever it is. sda is my windows drive.So rather than asking where to install the bootloader or give you the option like it used to, it just did it to my "first" drive.
What the hell? Now my Windows MBR is gone. I like to maintain that so if my linux drive dies I can still boot into windows via the old windows boot loader.Possible to move Grub2 to my other drive and repair windows 7 drive MBR?
I have Win 7 in my hard drive (sda) and I installed Ubuntu 10.04 in other hard disk (a usb disk), but when I try to boot my pc from the usb disk (sdb), the grub shell is displayed. No menu is displayed. When I boot Windows 7 from sda, it runs correctly. The problem it's when i wanna boot Ubuntu. I ran bootscript on the live CD and this is what I've obtained:
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda => Grub 2 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks on the same drive in partition #1 for /boot/grub.
So to make things short, here's my situation: I was having the "no module found" problem, because dell software kept on messing with the MBR So I restored the MBR using Windows recovery and deleted the dell software Re-installed ubuntu 10.10 off the liveCD ~Then I had problems getting GRUB2 boot menu to show at boot, but i fixed that~ Now I'm having the problem where whenever I try to boot into windows 7 through GRUB2 instead of booting windows I just get:
"bootmgr is missing"
Note: I can still boot into Ubunutu 10.10 just fine.
