T o n g wrote:

Hi, 

How can I put the .iso image on usb so that the usb boots with the latest 
devel release, grml-medium-devel_2008.09.28.iso for example?

The wiki http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=usb & grml2usb uses windoze 
FAT16 filesystem, but I hope I can put it into (and boot from) native 
Linux filesystems, using grub if possible.

thanks

hi
I have successfully set up grml on various usb sticks on various computers. However, I encountered difficulties because of low quality BIOSes.

1) First , I found the following website very usefull:

"http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Bootable_USB_Key"

2) Second, the BIOS problem.
A good BIOS should present you the option "Boot from USB-HDD" (boot from USB harddisk). This option allows you to set up FAT16 on the stick and it will boot.
However, low quality BIOS (like those found on popular MINI-ITX boards) only present the following options:
      USB-FDD (this is floppy) USB-CDROM and USB-ZIP. In

     In this case , you have to use USB-ZIP, but this *usually* does not work with FAT, because ZIP is a very different filesystem. In this case , you have to format with :

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 128 32     # for a stick with < 2GB

The details of this command are given on the link above. Note, that in the grml wiki, the mkdiskimage command is given as follows :

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 1 128 32    (note the "1" instead of "0" above )

This did not work for me, but I was too lazy to figure out why. In any case , the upper version with "0" as the third parameter worked fine for me in all cases.

(Concerning the *usually* that I mentioned above. There has been a test case where I was able to boot from a FAT Stick with the USB-ZIP option. I am sorry, but I did not recorded what exactly I did, but as far as I remember , the stick has been formatted with mkdiskimage and later on with fat, so I am not sure if this is a bootsector thing. What I am sure is, that in "most" cases, I was not able to boot from USB stick with a fat volume, when my BIOS did not offer the USB-HDD option on boot)

Concerning the ZIP filesystem, I was not able to create several partitions on the stick, the mkdiskimage command creates a single partitition, that I could not read with fdisk or cdisk. (So I was not able to resize, etc). Again, this might be very well due to my ignorance).

Concerning the boot loader, I successfully installed GRUB but I also used the syslinux approach from the link above.

Hope, that helps since grml on stick is great !
Peter