[solved] Put Gentoo ISO onto USB stick?

Message

eyebex · Post by **eyebex** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 8:17 pm

Okay, here's what I'd like to do: I have a MiniITX system with only hard drives inside which I want to install Gentoo on, so there is nothing to boot from. My idea was to basically put install-x86-minimal-2005.0.iso onto an USB stick to boot and install from there (this seems easier than some PXE network boot stuff). Yes, I've found and read HOWTO Gentoo LiveCD and LiveUSB, which is pretty much what I want, but all these guides assume you to have a running Gentoo Linux at hand. This is not the case for me (and I want to use the ISO as a base instead of livecd-ng), in fact I have no Linux running at all so far.

So I downloaded the ISO, mounted it under Windows, copied the files from there to the USB stick, renamed the isolinux.cfg file to syslinux.cfg and applied syslinux to the stick (which is pretty much what is described here). Booting itself went okay but then of course several errors occurred because of the missing modifications to linuxrc. But how shall I accomplish these with only Windows systems available? It seems I would need to uncompress livecd.squashfs, modify linuxrc, and compress it again, which seems impossible under Windows.

Do you guys have any other / better idea how to accomplish what I'm trying to do? Or is there someone who could supply me with a modified livecd.squashfs file?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: In the meantime, I found KnopperDisk (does not seem to be related to Knoppix, as it's Gentoo-based!), which is very nice, but won't boot in my MiniITX system (it does in my other PC).

cyrillic · Post by **cyrillic** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 10:07 pm

eyebex wrote:It seems I would need to uncompress livecd.squashfs, modify linuxrc, and compress it again, which seems impossible under Windows.

linuxrc is located in the initrd, not the sqashfs file.

... I'm not sure if this makes things any easier for you though.

hielvc · Post by **hielvc** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 10:22 pm

See this it might help [HowTo] gentoo linux on a compact flash card (chroot-build!)

eyebex · Post by **eyebex** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 10:42 pm

Thanks for your suggestions. As extracting the contents of install-x86-minimal-2005.0.iso to my USB stick and making it bootable turned out to be too tough for me, I've chosen another approach: I'm now using Feather Linux as a ready-to-boot-from-USB-stick distribution and simply copied install-x86-minimal-2005.0.iso to my USB stick, too. After booting Feather Linux, I'm going to mount the ISO using the loopback device and chroot to it to install Gentoo. Let's see if it works ...

EDIT: Arrrgh, the MiniITX system just won't boot off the USB stick. Well, it boots to the Feather Linux boot prompt, but then it always hangs just after "Loading Linux ...". It seems I'll have to temporarily install a CD-ROM drive in there after all ...

widan · Post by **widan** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 10:58 pm

You can try to boot your flash disk with "gentoo cdroot=/dev/sda1", if it doesn't auto-discover it. Which errors are you getting ?

eyebex · Post by **eyebex** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 11:16 pm

At which prompt am I supposed to enter "gentoo cdroot=/dev/sda1"? The only Linux that currently boots (well, see my error report above) is Feather Linux, so your suggestion unfortunately will not work. As to your question what errors I'm getting: None! The system just hangs after pressing enter at the "boot:" prompt. I wonder if that is in some way related to the 3ware RAID controller that is build into the MiniITX system ...

eyebex · Post by **eyebex** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 2:55 pm

As a followup, http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ seems to do the trick as it supports Gentoo (yet untested by me).

rystan · Post by **rystan** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 4:37 pm

I have a working Gentoo install on a 4GB flash drive.. I just installed to it, then chrooted and built a new kernel with usb support. I read all the instructions on making a LiveUSB using the LiveCD, but wantedd permanence. recently added the latest NVidia drivers to it flawlessly. The trick lies in fixing the fstab and grub configs correctly, since the drive becomes the first hd after install and reboot.

richard.scott · Post by **richard.scott** » Fri Oct 03, 2008 3:41 pm

rystan wrote:I have a working Gentoo install on a 4GB flash drive.. I just installed to it, then chrooted and built a new kernel with usb support. I read all the instructions on making a LiveUSB using the LiveCD, but wantedd permanence. recently added the latest NVidia drivers to it flawlessly. The trick lies in fixing the fstab and grub configs correctly, since the drive becomes the first hd after install and reboot.

Are you aware that this will reduce the lifespan of your flash drive and will kill it sooner rather than later?

rystan · Post by **rystan** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 3:41 pm

Wasn't really worried about lifespan of flash drive, it was government issued

I really just wanted to see if it could be done when none of the how-to docs I've read really matched what i had in mind. I might remake it for use for computers with greater then 1G ram and place all the common apps in a tmpfs in ram.

Svedge · Post by **Svedge** » Mon Dec 01, 2008 7:20 am

Fedora Liveusb Creator works like a dream with most distros

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[solved] Put Gentoo ISO onto USB stick?

[solved] Put Gentoo ISO onto USB stick?

Re: Putting install-x86-minimal-2005.0.iso onto an USB stick