On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 8:27 AM, tux <tux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have an 8GB flash drive that I would like to put multiple Fedora Live > CD's on. (KDE,Gnome,LXDE,XFCE, FEL, Games and Edu,Third party spins, etc. ) > > Does anyone have any advice on how to do this I think it should be straightforward to do this, but you'll need to do it carefully and methodically. I do something like this with my VirtualBox disk images. I put them in physical partitions for efficiency, but sometimes copy them out to regular, uncompressed files then convert them to sparse images then compress them with bzip2 for backup. I works real well, but is tedious and error-prone. I need to automate it or Imma gonna overwrite my /home with some WinXP disk image. Anyway what you need is a Master Boot Record on the first 512-byte sector of your USB stick. Make one small ext2 primary partition for /boot, then a logical partition for each of your live CDs. The MBR only allows four primary partitions, but only /boot needs to be a primary. So you can make one primary, then one extended. Within the extended you can make as many logical partitions as you like. The primary and extended partitions are stored directly in the MBR, towards the end of that first sector. The extended is divided up into logical partitions, with their positions and sizes specified in a linked list that is also inside the extended. I don't know the details but I would imagine each partition link element is just before each logical partition. Use "ls -s" to get the size of each of your LiveCD images in kilobytes. If they are compressed, decompress them first. Multiply the size in kilobytes by two to get the size in 512-byte sectors. When you partition your stick, use GNU parted - NOT GParted! Not the GUI partitioner, just parted, the command-line tool. Set the size unit to sectors. Use parted's help to get the exact syntax but I think you just use: unit s Create a /boot partition as I said with ext2. I don't think it needs to be very big - a megabyte or two would be plenty. It won't contain a kernel as /boots usually do. Create a logical partition for each of your LiveCDs. Make each partition EXACTLY the same number of sectors as the LiveCD image that will go into it. It's OK if the partition is bigger - it just wastes some space. Make sure it's not smaller. It's really best to be careful and methodical and get the size exactly the same. You'll need to figure out the /dev entry for your USB stick. Chances are that it is /dev/sdb though - the second SCSI drive. USB Mass Storage is built on the SCSI Architectural Model. /dev/sda would be your boot disk if you're using SATA, SAS or Parallel SCSI. If your boot disk is /dev/hda, then it is Parallel IDE. If that's the case then your USB stick is probably /dev/sda not sdb. *** Get It Right Or You'll Be Sorry! *** If your stick is /dev/sdb, then the stick's /boot partition is /dev/sdb1. Your LiveCD partitions are numbered starting with 5, because they are logical partitions - /dev/sdb5, /dev/sdb6, /dev/sdb7 and so on. Partition numbers 1 through 4 are reserved for primary and extended partitions. Now use the dd command to copy a LiveCD image into a partition: $ dd if=FedoraLive.iso of=/dev/sdb5 bs=512 That copies the FedoraLive.iso input file to the first logical partition as the output file with a block size of 512 bytes. Most storage devices have physical sector sizes of 512 bytes, so you are required to read or write them in integral multiples of 512. There's a couple pieces remaining though that I can't explain for you, but I can give you some hints: It *should* work to set up grub to chainload each of the LiveCD partitions. That should work just the same as if you were booting MS Windows. Grub would load the first sector out of the desired partition then run the boot loader found therein. What I don't have a clue about though is that booting a CD uses a package called ISOLINUX. You don't want ISOLINUX to boot a USB stick. There is another package for that, but you'll have to dig it up somehow as I don't remember. Basically what you need to do is replace the ISOLINUX on each partition with whatever the equivalent is for a USB stick. If I recall correctly the way ISOLINUX works is that it finds a Linux filesystem image in a single file on the CD, then it loads it as if it were a filesystem on a real hard disk. You should be able to use that same image file, but you will have to use some other software than ISOLINUX to load it. Hope That Help! Don Quixote -- Don Quixote de la Mancha quixote@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.dulcineatech.com Dulcinea Technologies Corporation: Software of Elegance and Beauty. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
