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In a similar fashion I wanted to run DyneBolic from a compact flash card. As a start I followed the instructions above after which my system didn't boot. The first problem was that the entry written to '''/boot/grub/menu.lst''' was incorrect as the '''root''' command was: In a similar fashion I wanted to run DyneBolic from a compact flash card which was attached to a IDE to Compact Flash adaptor (i.e. use a Compact Flash card instead of a hard drive). As a start I followed the instructions above after which my system didn't boot. The first problem was that the entry written to '''/boot/grub/menu.lst''' was incorrect as the '''root''' command was:

DynebolicFaq : [http://dynebolic.org/ dyne:bolic homepage]


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.

How To Boot DyneBolic From Compact Flash (Using IDE To CF Adapter)

In a similar fashion I wanted to run DyneBolic from a compact flash card which was attached to a IDE to Compact Flash adaptor (i.e. use a Compact Flash card instead of a hard drive). As a start I followed the instructions above after which my system didn't boot. The first problem was that the entry written to /boot/grub/menu.lst was incorrect as the root command was:

root (hd1,0)

However after dropping to grub and doing:

find /boot/grub/stage1

This showed that grub was located at:

root (hd0,0)

So I therefore edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and added a new entry which looked like this:

# Start dyne:bolic entry
title dyne:II DHORUBA (Edited)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /dyne/linux-2.6.18-ck1-dyne root=/dev/ram0 rw load_ramdisk=1 max_loop=64 vga=791
initrd /dyne/initrd.gz

After attempting to boot again I then received a new error:

Error 15: File Not Found

Further investigation showed that this problem was due to the kernel line as the kernel image should have been referring to /dyne/2618ck1d.krn rather than linux-2.6.18-ck1-dyne (this will change depending on the version of dyne:bolic you're using !).

A further edit later and I now have a working system booting from compact flash where my finished /boot/grub/menu.lst entry now looks like this:

# Start dyne:bolic entry
title dyne:II DHORUBA (Edited)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /dyne/2618ck1d.krn root=/dev/ram0 rw load_ramdisk=1 max_loop=64
initrd /dyne/initrd.gz

n.b. I also removed the vga=791 part of the command as this didn't work on my system.

Hope this is of use.


DynebolicFaq : [http://dynebolic.org/ dyne:bolic homepage]

DyneOnUsb (last edited 2011-07-08 18:07:40 by 0v0x)