Got Knoppix 5.0.1 successfully booting from USB key

Thought I should bring up this thread rather than starting a new one..
After experimenting a little with different laptops and USB-sticks, it seems to me that running mkdiskimage is not a decisive factor with the hardware I use. In every case where I was able to get the stick to boot using mkdiskimage, it worked as well with just partitioning (after wiping out just the partition table) formatting and running syslinux/copying files.
Also, if a stick is prepared, it can ALWAYS be used when the computer is able to boot and run off the CD/DVD: Just type knoppix fromhd=/dev/sda1 (or whatever is the partition).... at the boot prompt, and remove the CD/DVD after booting is complete.
The same trick can be used with sticks, if two can be mounted at the same time, or a USB-harddisk and a stick. I set up a 512MB stick with the basic booting, but nothing else, and used it to start booting, reading and running the complete system from larger sticks. This is written running off a 1GB stick started by a 512 MB.

My results with three laptops:
Toshiba satellite: Only CD/DVD booting, running from USB is OK - until interface "dies".
ASUS A3HF: 512MB sticks boot, none bigger.
Dell Inspiron 510m: Up to 1GB sticks boot, none bigger.

Using a 4 or 8 GB stick this way, one may drop remastering - except for doing different configuration changes or adding software not on the DVD. And it is very nice to be able to free up the DVD drive!

Thanks for the tip. I haven't tried with very large USB keys, so I haven't ran into the size limit yet. I do know that the 1GB limit is probably due to a cheap BIOS only recognizing USB-ZIP compatible drive geometry. I didn't know there was also a 512MB limit somewhere, I can't think of what would cause that.

I like the fromhd trick as well, to start booting from CD but later free up the CD drive for other use. Unfortunately you have to know what drive letter Linux will assign to your USB key first, on each PC. This will be sda1, sdb1, sdc1, and so on, depending on how many drives are installed in the PC and what kind they are (IDE, SCSI, SATA). This usually means booting up once fully from CD, just to see what it will be, then rebooting using fromhd. I once had a BIOS that would do the maddening thing of assigning completely different drive letters to the USB key, based on whether it booted from CD, local HD, or booted from USB! That was a pain to figure out.

8GB USB keys are great because you can drop the entire Knoppix DVD in there, and still have plenty of space left over for your own use, without having to remaster or delete anything.

It's still my hope that PC manufacturers will start to see USB booting as a sellable feature, and test it more thoroughly, working out all of these weird bugs and putting pressure on the BIOS programmers to please get it right this time :)

I have experimented more, and found out that using a 512MB stick for the initial booting, and then use fromhd=/dev/sdb1 etc is the easist way for me to proceed. Only falling back on the CD/DVD when all else fails. BIOSes are clearly sensitive to the stick size, but I have not had problems identifying a second stick or a USB harddisk. It does not seem to help making smaller partitions on a large stick, therefore the only reason I see for partitioning sticks, is that the volume containing til Knoppix image gets mounted ro, and it is useful to have another partition to save config and home directories in, eventually to have ext2/3 file systems in addition to FAT16/32..

Running from a USB harddisk is very simple and versatile, I now try it out with 4 partitions: One with the knoppix images, one with config, /home etc, one which may be mounted as a Unix /store partition and one to be mounted as /usr/local. Except for the /home cloop image, everything could be placed on a USB stick. Because of the frequent updating, the /home partition (file) is not very well suited for present day USB-sticks, they will get worn out quickly. Therefore, a hard disk partition or ramdisk is probably the best, reading/writing the file(s) to persistent storage at intervals. Is there a script for something like that?

I plan to use /usr/local for additional software installs, like Java versions, Mono varieties/languages, VMware Player/Server may also go there.

I service some machines that were purchased without CD's & USB's (probably paid extra.)
I built the USB key version on a key with removable media (a CF card) great! Thanks!
I put the CF card in a hard drive emulator .
When I start up it shows normal, including DMA support for hda [CF Card]
then:
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.
etc

I have tried a bunch of cheat code combinations, but if the right one exists I haven't found it.
Got it. Thanks to all.
GP

I have successfully used Puppy 2.17 and Knoppix 5.1.1, Booting off a USB. ( FAT 32) 1GB Sand Disk Ultra USB SD.


I got a little discouraged with trying to get Beryl working on Puppy. (primary sys- Intel 945G video)

A.)
http://puppylinux.org
I like how puppy boots up fast and runs on older systems.
Puppy was originally build ground up with a small foot print in mind. (These days, size isn't as much of a concern though.)
I had problems installing removing applications in Puppy. Also had problems with packages being outdated/missing or video (Intel 845G) Dri not Active/Open Gl from Original CD. Takes a little work.
Seems to take a lot of tweaking to get Beryl working in Puppy.

B.)Knoppix 5.1.1 boot off USB.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01...b-knoppix-510/
It does seem to boot slower. Beryl is native using cheat codes.
I like that Knoppix has a lot support in Package manager and hardware detection. It seems easier to install apps.
It seems Knoppix is more solid and supported. Is this assumption true?
If Knoppix booting off USB 'Emulates' a live boot from CD, how easy / hard is it to add remove apps? Do I have to recreate the "Live-CD"?
For example; I don't need Open office at the moment (400MB) or silly games and other apps that are packaged with 5.1.1.
How do I remove them? I tried through the package manager, but Office was still there and the updates didn't stick after restarting.
Do I have to stick with a 750MB partition for the "emulation of a Live CD" boot? I want to trim down the original package to what don't use, then build it up with what I do use.

Is Puppy linux ideal being that Knoppix seems to simulate a live CD distro using Persistence mode versus Puppy using one big personal file.
I ran out of space on the 1Gb memory with Knoppix. (Im getting a 2Gb tomorrow.)

Trying to way to cons/pros


Is there a way to configure a hardware profile at boot up? Meaning, It wont have to do a hardware detect again. I could just select, PC#2 or #4
At boot up and it would boot faster. It seems the Knoppix sits at boot up for a long time then continues then re-detects everything.

I do like the Eye Candy and transparencies (like Beryl) but also the portability. (Being able to boot on any of most of todays systems - good hardware detection.)

Trying to figure which Distro I want to stick with. (Knoppix or Puppy)

I want to decide, so that way I will spend my time to configure and customize...

Thanks for all you time / input/ Advice on this.

I am a novice to linux. , but learning.. :? [/b]

B.T.W: A neat little trick is to keep a floppy disk image of Linux USB boot disk on the USB for older systems. If the bios is old and doesnt boot off the usb, find a floppy and create the floppy in windows. Then reboot into USB Linux with floppy and USB ;-)

Thanks to Krellan2 for his brilliant guide. I've just booted a 5.0.1 Knoppix from my 1GB USB pendrive.
It all works fine and, obviously, faster than CDrom. Fast and fine as your guidelines are.
Being me a 4ever-newbie had to repeat the mkdiskimage step, for root privileges are needed from this point on.

The BIOS, a Phoenix-Award did recognize the pendrive as an USB-HDD either before and after. It was enough to change the priority of the HDD list and restore the Boot devices' list to HDD first (instead of CDrom first as it used to be for Knoppix to run).

Well, thank you very much again :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by marques

Thanks to Krellan2 for his brilliant guide. I've just booted a 5.0.1 Knoppix from my 1GB USB pendrive.
It all works fine and, obviously, faster than CDrom. Fast and fine as your guidelines are.
Being me a 4ever-newbie had to repeat the mkdiskimage step, for root privileges are needed from this point on.

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You're welcome! I'm glad it worked well for you. Yes, everything has to be done in the root shell, as root permissions are needed throughout.

I think I've posted this in reply to someone's post a long time ago, but not in the main thread here (and I've checked, nobody else did either)

Anyway: A nice setup that works for me:
1. I used an 8gig stick, formatted everything to one big FAT32 partition, made it primary and bootable using the syslinux method in winxp.

Now, at this point there's an issue, a normal windows machine can't see two partitions on a USB because of the way the windows USB drivers are written. Found a solution on the net: edit the drivers, have windows see the drive as a USB HDD instead of USB Flash Drive. Works.
Now you can partition and format the drive as if it was a normal HDD. You can also read and access all sections from windows.

2. Resized partition so that the SECOND partition is 4.1 GB (because I'm using the knoppix 5.1.1 DVD)
3. Copied contents of the Knoppix.iso image into the second partition (leaving about 300mb for persistent home image on the partition).
4. Moved contents of boot directory from second partition to the root of the first partition. Deleted boot directory from second partition.

Then I ran syslinux32 on the first directory again just in case.

Now, you basically have a USB flash drive with two partitions, both visible and accessible under linux, and only the first will be accessible on windows installs that don't have the tweaked USB Flash Drive driver.

Why? Because I wanted a separate data partition for school purposes that doesn't expose my Knoppix USB to corruption. This way I can avoid accidently (or intentionally) screwing up my persistent home file, or any other config files saved on the Knoppix partition, as they're not normally accessible under Windows.
Since the Knoppix bootloader actively searches the entire hardware for the Knoppix.img file, it doesn't really matter whether the bootloader is actually in the same partition as the image, so the whole setup works well. It will easily boot knoppix with the boot files in the first partition and everything else in the second, and this will also allow the first partition, containing whatever data you wish to store on it, be accessible under any windows machine.
I installed PortableApps on the first partition.

I used Paragon Partition Manager 8.5 Pro for all of the partitioning/formatting.
Link to the driver tweaking instructions: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?...=0#entry474505

oh

i can not make my usb writable

how??

i run the code like yours

but do nothing

i was able to use these instructions to get my knoppix on a flash drive running:
http://<a href="http://www.pendrivel...noppix-510</a>

and fine tune it using the information in this thread..

good stuff.....and thanks for the excellent information.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hvinelinux

i was able to use these instructions to get my knoppix on a flash drive running:
http://<a href="http://www.pendrivel...noppix-510</a>

and fine tune it using the information in this thread..

good stuff.....and thanks for the excellent information.

---

Last night I was able to follow those instructions (the instructions on www.pendrivelinux.com) to create a Knoppix bootable USB drive & it worked... much to my surprise, the 1st time! It made a 750m partition & a second partition, the rest of the 4gig USB drive I used. Once booted from the USB, it sees the 2nd USB partition & the 2 NTFS partitions on my WinXP hard drive.

The only issue is that WindowsXP does not see the 2nd partition. The command from #11 in the instructions:

mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdx2

Formats the partition. I've tried modifing the command from #9:

mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n usb /dev/sdx1
to
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n usb /dev/sdx1

to make a FAT32 partition, but it doesn't appear to work.

I've searched this thread a bit but was unable to find what I'm looking for. All I want it to make the 2nd partition, about 3 gig, a FAT32 that Windows can read & write to. Is this possible?

TIA

Regards,
Joe S.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bruinwar

The only issue is that WindowsXP does not see the 2nd partition. ...

---

I am not sure if this restriction is lifted for modern windows, but in the DOS days, only one primary partition per hard drive could be recognised. Try defining the rest of your disk as an extended partition, then allocate a logical vfat unit inside that (you'd thus be using sdx5 instead of sdx2).

On this same thread, I have a small ebox with no cdrom, but bootable via compact flash. I used the directions (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/01/usb-knoppix-510) on my 1gb compact flash and it worked perfect.

I'm now booted into knoppix, and want to setup the OS on the internal 2gb embed disk. I thought I could do the same, so setup 2 partitions (hda1/2, each 1gb) transfered the info over to b, but realized I can't use the windows commands to setup the boot partition on hda1 so now I am stuck.

Basically I am asking, how do I setup hda1 to boot and run the OS w/o the need for the flash card.

Thanks.

Hi.
Very good tutorial, I finally managed to boot Knoppix from my USB stick.

I'm stuck however at the part where I'm to fool Knoppix that USB is not a cdrom and that we should be able to write to it.
I run root shell and typed in those commands:

mount -o remount,rw /cdrom
mount --bind /cdrom /media/sdz4

Then when i typed in:

vi /media/sdz4/syslinux.cfg

I was only able to see the file (it's read-only). Same if I edit syslinux.cfg using KWrite it won't let me save the changes as it says:
THe document could not be saved, as it was not possible to write to file:///cdrom/syslinux.cfg. Check that you have write access to this file or that enough disk space is available.

It seems to me that I coulnd't let Knoppix follow my 2 "mount" commands and it still regards this file as read-only.

Can anybody help me out? I've browsed through those 10 pages of forum replies, but haven't found an answer.

Any tips much appreciated.
Qlex

Hi,
doesn't anybody have any solutions for the above described problem associated with "mount" commands? my usb is still recognized as cdrom and therefore i can't write to syslinux.cfg file.
Any tips would be greately appreciated.

Qlex

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bruinwar

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hvinelinux

i was able to use these instructions to get my knoppix on a flash drive running:
http://<a href="http://www.pendrivel...noppix-510</a>

and fine tune it using the information in this thread..

good stuff.....and thanks for the excellent information.

---

Last night I was able to follow those instructions (the instructions on www.pendrivelinux.com) to create a Knoppix bootable USB drive & it worked... much to my surprise, the 1st time! It made a 750m partition & a second partition, the rest of the 4gig USB drive I used. Once booted from the USB, it sees the 2nd USB partition & the 2 NTFS partitions on my WinXP hard drive.

The only issue is that WindowsXP does not see the 2nd partition. The command from #11 in the instructions:

mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdx2

Formats the partition. I've tried modifing the command from #9:

mkfs.vfat -F 16 -n usb /dev/sdx1
to
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n usb /dev/sdx1

to make a FAT32 partition, but it doesn't appear to work.

I've searched this thread a bit but was unable to find what I'm looking for. All I want it to make the 2nd partition, about 3 gig, a FAT32 that Windows can read & write to. Is this possible?

TIA

Regards,
Joe S.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by kirol

I am not sure if this restriction is lifted for modern windows, but in the DOS days, only one primary partition per hard drive could be recognised. Try defining the rest of your disk as an extended partition, then allocate a logical vfat unit inside that (you'd thus be using sdx5 instead of sdx2).

---

Windows will only read the first partition on a usb flash drive. There's a solution that involves tweaking the windows driver for the specific drive to make it treat it like a hard drive, but you have to remember that you can only use that on machines where you have administrative access, which is not the case in schools etc.
I have no idea how Vista handles this, but it's probably safe to assume it will ignore the second partition too, just like all other windows...

The better solution is to create two partitions on the flash drive, make the first bootable, but only load it with the files from the boot directory from the knoppix cd/dvd (place them in the root of the partition), and put everything else in the 2nd partition. Your second partition only needs to be large enough for your knoppix image (and possbily the persistant image file, if you want to store it there).
This way, not only is your first partition (i..e the data partition) available on all machines, but the second one is effectively protected from unwanted changes on most machines running windows (except for the one where you tweaked the driver).
Lastly, you want to make all knoppix files on the first partition hidden and read only.

Bottom of page 9 has an older post with the instructions for doing this.


As for the mounting read/write issue:

if you use the dual partition system, only the knoppix image partition is locked to read only.
all other partitions and drives can be changed from any level.

For the knoppix image partition:
open root shell
you can't umount this partition, and you don't need to bind cdrom to it, as it's already bound.
just
mount -o remount,rw,users /cdrom

once you have this partition set up, and your persistent image set up, you really don't need to touch it and can simply leave it locked to read only mode (which isn't really true, as it does make changes to the persistent image).

I installed Knoppix 5.1.1 per the instructions at the start of this thread.

It works beautifully except for one thing: I have to hit Carriage Return after the window appears during boot allowing me to use the Persistent Image. There are four choices in the Window.

I only have 10 seconds to hit CR, and the odd thing is that "OK" is already specified yet it is not accepted unless I hit carriage return. If I don't type CR the persistent image is not used.

I did make the specified edits to Syslinux.cfg.

The USB drive is 2 GB and is formatted with 64 cylinders and 32 sectors per track for USB-ZIP compatibility. It is set up as Partition 4.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Kent

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KAWill70.

I installed Knoppix 5.1.1 per the instructions at the start of this thread.

It works beautifully except for one thing: I have to hit Carriage Return after the window appears during boot allowing me to use the Persistent Image. There are four choices in the Window.

I only have 10 seconds to hit CR, and the odd thing is that "OK" is already specified yet it is not accepted unless I hit carriage return. If I don't type CR the persistent image is not used.

I did make the specified edits to Syslinux.cfg.

The USB drive is 2 GB and is formatted with 64 cylinders and 32 sectors per track for USB-ZIP compatibility. It is set up as Partition 4.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, Kent

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Maybe you need to get off the typwriter?
:idea: