Making bootable usb drives

[silentmyst]

I know there is someway in linux to make a bootable usb drive, using the DD and mount commands, i'm just not sure how to do it. Can anyone help me?

[oz]

Here's a wiki article that might be related enough to get you going:

Make a bootable FaunOS USB flash drive - FaunOS Wiki

[Taltos]

I know this may not be exactky what you are looking for, but I've found Boot and run Linux from a USB flash memory stick | USB Pen Drive Linux do be very helpful. It was instructions for running most distros off a pen drive.

Here's some more info a quick google search revealed:
Rene Mayrhofer Making a USB Stick bootable with Grub

Good luck. I hope these sites help you a little.

Also, certain distros (e.g. Wolvix) have a utility in their GUI control center to easily make a USB bootable with that distro.

[silentmyst]

Thanx both of u, your help is much appearciated.

But does anyone know how to "mount" an iso on a usb drive? using either windows or linux?

[Taltos]

As far as I know, you can always mount an iso, no matter where it is, using the "mount" command. The "umount" command will unmount the iso.

Simply make an empty directory somewhere, such as /mnt/usb1. Then mount the iso there, which should be something like "mount /dev/sdc1/something.iso /mnt/usb1"

You'll have to replace sdc1 with the proper location of the iso, either a hard drive or usb. The "something.iso" will be replaced by the file name. And the last part will be the empty directory you created, wherever it is.

If you're doing this from bootup, you'll probably want to mount directly to "/" but I'm really not sure.

You'll need root access to do all this, of course.

Those websites weren't a help at all?

[silentmyst]

They helped some, but i'm looking to use it to install sabayon over my current installation. Will this work to do that?

[i92guboj]

They helped some, but i'm looking to use it to install sabayon over my current installation. Will this work to do that?

This is not trivial. Making it bootable is not a problem, you can use grub-install for that. How to boot it is another matter, and I think that you will need a kernel that's outside the iso to boot from, I guess.

I never did it myself but I think some people have achieved it.

Maybe it will be easier to mount the iso and investigate if there's an installation script that you can launch manually.