[Cialug] Making a bootable USB

[Paul Gray]

Other alternatives, not yet mentioned, but since we're on the subject:

finnix.org -- boot up the cd, then run "finnix-thumbdrive" to automate building 
a USB-based finnix image.  It should also be mentioned that the live CD can PXE 
boot itself to clients, too.

www.backtrack-linux.org -- pull off the backtrack directories and run the 
usb-automated script.  Easy and robust.  Instructions at:
   http://www.backtrack-linux.org/tutorials/usb-live-install/

A full 4GB Debian AMD64 distro of my own rolling can be pulled from here
   http://gray.cs.uni.edu/ISOs/usb-4GB-debian-amd64.img.bz2
It's my own tool for general-purpose recovery and for fixing all of the stuff 
that I seem to break, so it gets a lot of use.  There's not a canned install 
routine other than to lay it down on a 4GB USB image using:

   bzcat usb-4GB-debian-amd64.img.bz2 | sudo dd of=/dev/<usbdevice>

Swap space is at the end of the drive image so as to accommodate variances in 
"4GB" USB sizes.  The partitions mount by ext label scripting foo, so your drive 
mappings are sane when you boot up.

Some key features were born of necessity: It has (limited) raid45 support for 
recovery (dmraid in general for raid 1-4, but dmraid45 support is a rarity), 
RocketRaid support, and a few other "nuances" for esoteric controllers. It boots 
up right into grub (which can fix a lot of things by itself), root password is 
blank, apt-get install for new utilities (persistent since root is rw), etc.



Hoping that someone finds one of these three suggestions useful.

-- 
Paul Gray                                         -o)
314 East Gym, Dept. of Computer Science           /\\
University of Northern Iowa                      _\_V
  Message void if penguin violated ...  Don't mess with the penguin
  No one says, "Hey, I can't read that ASCII attachment ya sent me."