[Fedora-livecd-list] Live USB converter script

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 11:30 -0400, Will Woods wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 16:33 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > A better choice is to take the live CD image and copy the bits from it
> > to your USB stick.  The result is the attached script.  Run it with
> > arguments of the live CD iso image and the device of your USB key and it
> > copies over the bits of the live CD onto your USB stick and makes it
> > bootable.  Supported filesystems for your USB stick are vfat/msdos and
> > ext23.
> 
> Just a note - the -d flag to syslinux doesn't exist in syslinux-3.11
> (i.e. doesn't work in FC6). The script should maybe check for that.
> Something like:
> 
> if ! syslinux 2>&1 | grep -qe -d; then
>     echo "Your syslinux is too old for this."
>     exit 1
> fi

I don't know how common of a use case grabbing the script off of a web
site/git directly instead of using the package is, though.

> > What do people think?  It seems to work from some quick testing and it's
> > impressive just how much faster it is going from a USB stick.
> 
> The only thing keeping this from being face-meltingly awesome is the
> lack of persistent storage. Well, that and I can't get it to boot from
> my USB key: "Missing operating system" every time. Maybe it doesn't like
> vfat? I'll try ext3 and see what happens.

vfat should be fine.  Making sure the partition is bootable is
definitely needed.  I filed a bug about that yesterday so that I don't
forget to add something to at least try to check.

Jeremy