How to set a sdb1 (USB Mamory Stick) as a boot able disk

[Avestan]

Hello,

I have a USB which I would like to make the device boot able. I have looked into fdisk and it appears that using fdisk I can only set a partition to a boot able.

Please have a look at the output of fdisk command. In the following the sdb1 and sdc1 are both USB Memory Stick. As you can see the sdc1 is set as boot but the sdb1 is not.

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          25      200781   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              26        2575    20482875   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2576        4615    16386300   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            4616        9729    41078205    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            4616        5635     8193118+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            5636        6400     6144831   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            6401        6910     4096543+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8            6911        7420     4096543+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 2013 MB, 2013265920 bytes
196 heads, 15 sectors/track, 1337 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2940 * 512 = 1505280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1        1338     1966079+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 1024 MB, 1024966656 bytes
156 heads, 63 sectors/track, 203 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 9828 * 512 = 5031936 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1         204     1000943+  83  Linux
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(124, 155, 63) logical=(203, 107, 63)

What I would like to do is to set the sdb1 as sdc1 boot able.

Thank in advance for your help.

Avestan

[henrikau]

Linux does not care about the bootable-flag. In fact, it can boot from just about anything as long as the bootloader can load and find the disk.

If you want to boot from an usb-disk, the first thing you need to check, is if the BIOS and motherboard supports boot from usb (as you need to install grub on the portable disk).

have a look at the Debian bootable usb-key guide:

BootUsb - Debian Wiki

Good luck!