How to boot DyneBolic from USB

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

If you are looking for instructions on how to save your personal data on a USB stick, then this is not the right place, look at ["Nesting"]. 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 stick of ~685MB, but you may want a bit more space for your personal files. If your USB stick is smaller try ["Nesting"] instead.

little briefing:

the boot system consists of a bootloader, in our case grub
the bootloader loads a kernel, in our case linux
the kernel loads a ramdisk, in our case dyne:II initrd.gz
the ramdisk will look for a dyne/ dock

we keep both kernel and ramdisk in a dock and install grub

Use this tutorial from a running dyneII system (installed to a harddrive or running as a liveCd):

Open a terminal window.
Find what device your USB drive is:
- ```
cat /proc/partitions
```
- hda means your primary IDE harddrive, sd... generally means a RAID/SCSI/USB device
- From here on in, this tutorial assumes your usb device is /dev/sda, if it's not /dev/sda, change it as necessary.
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
Format your drive:
- ```
mke2fs /dev/sda1 
```
- Change it to mke2fs -j... if you want to use EXT3 instead of EXT2. However, it is probably not advised to use the EXT3 journaled filesystem on a flash/USB device. 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 outside of Linux). 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.
Mount the drive:
- ```
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb 
```
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.
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)

Your USB device is ready!

inside the boot/grub/menu.lst there are the default options to boot, they should work although some times they might need (hd0,0) to be changed to (hd1,0) depending on how the computer sees the usb...