Table of Contents
Create Bootable USB Drive
I will go straight to the step by step instructions and put the so-called theoretical information towards the end of this page, so that people who are only interested in getting it done can get straight into it
I have done this a lot of time on Linux, but I recently discovered that I may be able to do it on Windows as well - so I may insert something on that later.
Linux Platform
Tools needed (mostly available by default on all major Linux distro):
- fdisk - for partitioning (recommended for USB drives with >4GB storage)
- mkfs - for preparing filesystem (go for something specific e.g. mkdosfs for FAT filesystem)
Obviously, we also need a live system (system that mostly run on RAM and does no need to be installed to a hard disk) - for this, I recommend Slax or Porteus. Both (Porteus is actually a Slax spin-off) are based on Slackware, a highly recommended Linux distribution that I personally use.
Windows Platform
coming soon…
Hard Disks and Geometries
- talk about CHS and LBA
Using fdisk
Creating 2GB partition at the end of the drive
- for 512-bytes sector size, allocate 2x1024x1024x1024/512=4194304 sectors
- subtract this value from total sector
- make sure the end value of previous partition ends on resulting value
Case study 1
For 16GB devices (~14GB+2GB), when making the second partition as active partition, installing syslinux onto that partition is still okay. But when doing similar config on 32GB devices, syslinux fails. Why?