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 about ["Nesting"], on how to save your personal data on a USB stick, then this is not the right place. This page documents on how to put the WHOLE SYSTEM on the usb stick.

The WHOLE SYSTEM requires a USB at least the size of the /dyne directory (currently ~655MB at version 2.4.2), and maybe a bit more space for your personal files. If your USB stick is smaller than that, try ["Nesting"] instead.

little briefing:

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

do the following operations from a running dyne:II DHORUBA 2.3 (i will assume the usb stick is recognized as /dev/sda)

Contrary to the following suggestions, 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). Read up on journaled vs non-journaled file systems and make an informed decision in your case.

partition the usb stick as a unique EXT3 journaled partition (or FAT32 to read the drive in windows):

  1. Start the partition tool:
    • cfdisk /dev/sda
      • With cfdisk:
      • delete all partitions
      • create a new primary at maximum size
      • put the type to 83 (Linux)
      • write everything and quit
  2. Format your drive:
    • mke2fs /dev/sda1 
    • Change it to mke2fs -j... if you want to use EXT3 instead of EXT2.

  3. Mount the drive:
    • mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb 
  4. Install grub:
    • Figure out what device your usb drive is (hda means your primary harddrive, sd... means a SCSI/USB device)

    • cat /proc/partitions
    • Then install grub to that partition
    • 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.

  5. 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 alltough some times they might need (hd0,0) to be changed to (hd1,0) depending on how the computer sees the usb...