Booting Knoppix from a USB Flash drive

[KnoppIXuser]

Any ideas about booting Knoppix from a 1 GB/512 MB USB flash drive?
My BIOS supports chossing USB-FDD as first boot device. I guess just need to configure the boot sequence in such a way that it looks for system files on second partition of the USB drive.
What else may need to me done ?

[seberbach]

This idea is one I have been working on. Being new to Linux, I am slow because I have so much to learn, I can hardly keep up with the forums let alone contribute innovations of my own.

Some thoughts so far:

Compact Flash much cheaper than USB Key.

CF USB2.0 Adaptor and 30X flash, best prices from http://www.insidecomputer.com

Don't use older 1.1 version of USB, or older slower Flash cards.

So far I have received flash formatted with FAT for Windows, and not tried re-partitioning to new file system(s). Complex subject, that.

Recommend for first method, put /Knoppix directory in FAT already on flash. Boot from floppy, or CD which is made to have no /knoppix directory.

Recommend for second method, boot up into text mode Windows, using boot image from a Windows rescue disk. Use loadlin to start Knoppix.
See instructions elsewhere on this forum. This should allow very fast boot without modifying flash partitioning or file format.

Anything better you can figure out, please let me know, as I am just a newbie!

[David Douthitt]

I have both CompactFlash and SecureDigital. I have a pocket memory device called a Cruzer (from SanDisk) which uses removable SD cards - very nice, that.

I have cables so I can hook this up on demand, as well as multi-card readers that will read both my SD and CF cards (using USB).

I created a floppy disk knoppix.sh that would 1) make /usr/local part of the writable /ramdisk volume, and 2) search for knoppix.sh, knoppix.rb, knoppix.pl, or knoppix.py and run whichever it found. In my case, it is knoppix.rb (a Ruby script) located on the 128M Cruzer device.

This script mounts a couple of ext2 images (located on a FAT volume) and copies the data onto the system - including most of the important user settings, various system settings - and then starts swap automatically (including windows swap files) - then it starts selected servers automatically.

There's no reason that the 128M card has to be FAT formatted; my other 128M card is ext3 formatted - though I had to format it myself.

Only problem so far is that Knoppix won't support the multicard readers because they need the "Scan for all connected LUNs on a SCSI device" option set in the kernel (and it isn't).

[Robert Michel]

Salve!

Sounds what you guys try to run.
Please write about your projects here:
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/HdBasedHowTo

>5. boot from smartdisk, usb-stick, ROM....
>
>Please write here about your experiances to boot from your >MP3-Player, or what ever....

rob

[Robert Michel]

To boot from USB stick you must use the same trick as booting
from hd, extrating from boot.img two files:
"miniroot.gz" & "vmlinuz"
and create lilo on USB stick.
Does a USB stick has an MBR?

Please play with the small Knoppix kix (195 MB) for the first
trys. Or if you have only > 128 MB play with small Linuxes
fd-projects and write about your experiances - success here.
rob