Knoppix on a 4GB USB Drive?

[apoc]

Hey, I have a 4GB Gigabank drive by i/o Magic and I want to install Knoppix on it so I can boot it up from any PC with USB port and not have to carry the CD. I have heard a little bit about this and I think I remember that the BIOS has to support booting from USB and I dont know if most computers have that or not. If I cant use the drive to run Knoppix from, I want to at least have all the settings saved on it along with the /home directory so I can download and keep some files on it. Thanks for the help!

[andyk]

If your bios doesn´t support booting from usb or firewire try a boot diskette or burn a cdrom or dvdrom with a bootimage to start knoppix from external harddisk.

[Mrakzrak]

It is very interesting that nobody know anything about booting Knoppix from USB stick !?

There some instructions like: All you need is .......

* Knoppix or an already stripped down version
* USB Memory Stick
* Computer capable of booting from USB
* kernel with cloop-support
* syslinux
* A little hacker who will do everything for you.


Idea of having Knoppix is to have syslinux in easy way. If I already have syslinux I would not use Knoppix !

I think that now it is very custom having USB stick of 1GB or larger, and that there are many computers which are able to boot from USB stick (IBM and other laptops etc.). Booting some OS from CD-Rom is probably one outdated solution because of the CD dimensions and fragility.

You used so much time making Knoppix and no time for additional instructions, like this one.

So, ok. Until I get detailed instructions how to boot Knoppix from USB i will use plain old Windows XP. The world surely will not end because of that, but probably I will be one of the 1000 who know that Knoppix exist at all.

Mrak

[apoc]

I dont quite understand the point of Mrak's post but if it was to provoke an answer, I would gladly appreciate some help on this. I mean I know how to burn an iso to cd and make it bootable, now how do I do it with a usb hard drive. Or, even better can I use the hard drive install instructions and just format the usb key with linux partitions? thanks!

[ruymbeke]

... You used so much time making Knoppix and no time for additional instructions, like this one ...
So, ok. Until I get detailed instructions how to boot Knoppix from USB i will use plain old Windows XP. The world surely will not end because of that, but probably I will be one of the 1000 who know that Knoppix exist at all. Mrak

Well, I have done it with my IBM laptop and my USB dongle key:
I made my USB dongle DOS bootable with a FA16 partition and automatically start grub.exe from the autoexec.bat.
Then Grub loads the kernel and initrd from the dongle and finally boot knoppix from the ISO image also on the dongle.
Have a look at the end of this forum string: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11796
and feel free to use the files included in here: http://s119307663.onlinehome.us/grube.zip
Best Regards, Gilles

[drdirt]

apoc

i'm in the same boat and would dearly like a reply I can make sense of. I have a 5 GB USB drive & I know all the machines I regularly use can boot from USB drives, but I can't seem to make sense of any of the info I've found for doing this with any linux distro. I basically want to be able to carry linux, open office, GRASS and associated data with me to various places using the USB drive. So if anyone out there can give plain english instructions to a linux wannabe like me I'd be very grateful.

Cheers

[spyhome]

TDot did a great work with his "HowTo boot Deam Small Linux from a USB fob" . His page is here:
http://fuzzymunchkin.dyndns.org/tdot/usbkeyfob/
I did a translation of the first section into German, which you can find here:
http://www.spyhome.de/usbknoppix.html

I wasn't able to boot the new Knoppix 3.8.1 this way!! Maybe someone as an idea.
I think it has something to do with the initrd.gz and the new way usb modules are loaded, because syslinux starts up, loads the kernel and the initrd file and then quits with a kernel panic.

Greadings
Christian