Bootable flash drive

[Dazed_75]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Nathan England <nathan at paysonlinux.org>wrote:

>
> I am trying to make a bootable USB flash drive. This is just a regular 2 GB
> PNY flash device from walmart for 12 bucks. Nothing special. I have read a
> dozen sites how to make this work, and they all focus on formatting the
> device
> with fat16. However, I have a PC-BSD image that I dd'd onto it and it boots
> and works just dandy, however it does not have a fat16 partition on it.
>

If it boots and works just dandy, why would you care if it has a FAT16
partition on it?

>
> How do I create a bootable flash drive with an ext partition?
>

Gparted, Parted Magic, etc can do this trivially. As you indicate below the
issue may be the image you are putting on it and maybe GRUB.  I do not know
what PC-BSD is, but take a look at unetbootin at

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

which can make bootable flash drives for many systems including FreeBSD and
NetBSD.


> This really cannot be this complicated, can it? My laptop will boot off a
> USB
> device. I tried just creating a partition and formatting it ext2, making it
> bootable with fdisk and putting what I wanted on it, however I just get
> errors... and not the kind like my boot scripts are not working.  I have so
> far used GRUB... maybe that is my problem, but everything else uses
> syslinux,
> which again, wants fat16...
>

Can you say "Thank you, Bill"?

>
> I appreciate any help or pointers,
>
> Nathan
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-- 
Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions,
that I wish it always to be kept alive.
 - Thomas Jefferson
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