Booting dsl from a USB stick (or booting any similar distro, for that matter)

[borromini]

Well I'm a big Slackware fan, and I'd love to have a live CD on a stick. I already tried putting Slax on a USB stick before, but it failed when syslinux came into play . What's the FS your stick is using? FAT32 or FAT16? Or maybe even ext2/3 ?

[bigtomrodney]

It's a FAT16, which is fine, but when I tried to drop in two modules that had similar names which were both quite long it kept saying they already existed....forgot about the 8.3 filename on FAT16. You may want to format it as ext2/3 or FAT32 which might be a bit more useful across platforms. That's actually cool that you can choose because several other USB os's require ext2 as their system.

Slax used to fail for me with the syslinux part too in both the older versions for two different reasons, firstly because there was that old script that had problems which is now replaced by the graphical installer and the other reason was I was using a USB stick that would boot under any conditions, even with DOS. As it turns out you need to edit some Hex values on the stick to make it bootable initially. It was a bit risky and there seemed like more chance of loss than gain. I never used cfdisk to try make the stick bootable, maybe that would be enough if you find the stick is the problem. Just remember it's /dev/sda that needs to be bootable, not /dev/sda1

(made that mistake a few times before I realised wherer I was going wrong )

[borromini]

Yep, the stick as a whole, not the partition... Do you know if it will still be bootable if formatted as ext2/3 or FAT32? I read somewhere FAT16 was needed for that - or am I mistaken and is that only for the DOS compatibility?

[bigtomrodney]

Well I've certainly booted from FAT32 in work, and although I can't personally vouch for ext2/3 but from memory FlashLinux used it - I think it still does FlashLinux

As far as I know the MBR only gives information like which block on the boot partition to go from. Doesn't the OS itself look after the filesystem once it boots beyond an early stage? If you can get you hands on the latest Slax it's well worth it. I got my hands on the modules for Captive NTFS and the ntfs.sys files. I also got some other admin tools and it's ready for some real work, alongside xine for watching the few episdes of Family Guy that are going on alongside it on the 2GB key