Unable to boot Live Fedora on a USB flash drive

[Richard Shaw]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Stewart Williams
<lists at pinkyboots.co.uk> wrote:
> I am trying to create a LiveUSB drive using a 2GB USB flash drive, but
> I'm being unsuccessful for some reason.
>
> Ideally I was hoping to create one based on Omega-10, but I get the same
> problems with Fedora.
>
> Here's what I have tried:
>
> 1. Creating a LiveCD from omega-10-desktop.iso and boot it (which works
> fine).
> Plug in USB stick, fdisk it as one partition, type 6 (fat 16) then
> format it by running 'mkfs.msdos -F 16 -n usbdisk /dev/sdg1'
> As root running 'livecd-iso-to-disk /dev/live /dev/sdg1'
> Seems to complete without error
>
> 2. Boot Fedora 9 install on my desktop and prepare the USB stick as above
> Run liveusb-creator GUI and select /dev/sdg1 as target, and
> omega-10-desktop.iso as source (Also tried F10-Live-i686.iso as source)
> Completes without error
>
> However when I try and boot of the stick either by physically booting
> using the BIOS or testing with QEMU I get the following errors:
>
> Running 'qemu -hda /dev/sdg -m 256 -std-vga' or booting using a physical
> PC I get a garbled prompt
>
> http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?07644a5805.png
>
> Running 'qemu -hda /dev/sdg1 -m 256 -std-vga' I get an error stating
> that it can find the root filesystem
>
> http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?159f02408f.png
>
> Does anyone know what I may be doing wrong?
>
> Many Thanks.

It looks like in the first case it doesn't like the MBR. I get
something similar when I leave my iPod connected to my work laptop on
reboot. One thing, not all usb sticks like all BIOS's. It could be the
stick, it could be your BIOS, no good way to tell that I know of.

Richard