How to boot DyneBolic from USB

The following instructions explain how to make a USB storage device (like a USB key) bootable with the GRUB bootloader and install dyne:bolic on it so that you can run it from USB, without a harddisk or CD.

If you are looking for instructions on how to save your personal data on a USB stick, then please look at ["Nesting"]. If you're looking to copy the entire system over to your harddrive, then please look at ["Docking"]. This page documents on how to put the whole system on the usb stick.

The whole system requires a USB device about the size of the /dyne directory (currently ~655MB at version 2.4.2) + ~30MB (for file system headers). Therefore, the entire system should fit on a USB key of ~685MB, but you may want a bit more space for your personal files. If your USB stick is smaller try ["Nesting"] instead.

How dyne:bolic II boots (technical):

• The boot system consists of a bootloader, in this case grub

• The bootloader loads a kernel, in our case linux

• The kernel loads a RAMdisk (a virtual device that resides on RAM memory), in our case initrd.gz
• The RAMdisk looks for a dyne/ dock
• Both the kernel and RAMdisk are put in a dock and GRUB is installed.

Use this tutorial from a running dyne:bolic system, it should be nested or running as a liveCd:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Find what device your USB drive is:

   • cat /proc/partitions

   • Ignore the entries that end in numbers, those are individual partitions on each separate device. The ones that end in letters are different devices.

   • hda means your primary IDE harddrive, sd... generally means a RAID/SCSI/USB device

   • If you're confused, look at the blocks column, which shows the # of 1KB blocks on the device. If you know how big your USB stick is, you can find it this way. ~1,000,000 blocks = a 1 gigabyte device; ~64,000 blocks = 64MB device.

   • From here on in, this tutorial assumes your usb device is /dev/sda, if it's not /dev/sda, change it accordingly.
3. Start the partition tool:

   • cfdisk /dev/sda

     • With cfdisk:
     • delete all partitions
     • create a new primary at maximum size (Don't use the "Maximize" button, it does something very different)
     • put the type to 83 (Linux)
     • write everything and quit
4. Format your drive:

   • mke2fs /dev/sda1 

   • Change it to mke2fs -j... if you want to use EXT3 instead of EXT2. However, it is not advisable to use the EXT3 journaled filesystem on a flash/USB device, because journaling writes to the disk more often than necessary, which wears out the USB device more quickly. Use a non-journaled filesystem such as EXT2 (Linux only) or FAT32 (if you want to make your usb device readable from other OSs, such as Windoze). The default (ext2) is a safe choice, however, you may want to read up on journaled vs non-journaled file systems and make an informed decision in your case.

5. Mount the drive:

   • mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb 

6. Install grub:

   • grubconfig

   • Select the usb device, generally the last item in the list.

   • Note: If all the items in the list start with hda..., the computer you're currently using can't be booted from a usb device and you'd be installing grub to a partition of your harddrive instead. Quit, then find another computer.

7. Copy the dyne/ dock directory from the CD

   • rsync -Pr /mnt/cd1/dyne /mnt/usb/

   • (rsync is better than cp and we have a progressbar)
8. Try booting your USB device. If it works, great! If not:
   • Open your /boot/grub/menu.lst (on the USB device) and change the root(...) line from (hd0,0) to (hd1,0). Save the old line as a comment.
   • There is an alternate set of boot options in /dyne/menu.lst, which selects a different kernel (use if it complains how it can't mount the drive), and replace the kernel line. Save the old line as a comment. (Try this with the default root line and the alternate)

Your USB device is ready!

Note: This does not seem to work if your USB device is sdb... (ie, on a system with a RAID hd), the usb device is never loaded into /boot/volumes, so the system complains about not having a dyne system to boot from. If you put the CD in, it works fine.