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Posted

I want to say that just having an iso on the drive is not going to work. What you need is to have the OS "installed" on the flash drive, like you would on any hard drive. The only difference being is that the flash drive is removable.

If I am wrong about the iso bit, someone feel free to jump in here and call me on it. Would be interesting if you could do that though.........

Posted

Think of your USB drive as a floppy or a CD.

You don't put an ISO on any of those as a regular file to get the thing to boot off of it. No, you dump the ISO onto the medium, starting at the first sector and move on down the device, completely oblivious to things like filesystems. Once done you take it out/off, place it back in/on and hey! Lookit that. A filesystem is there complete with content.

Posted
Think of your USB drive as a floppy or a CD.

You don't put an ISO on any of those as a regular file to get the thing to boot off of it. No, you dump the ISO onto the medium, starting at the first sector and move on down the device, completely oblivious to things like filesystems. Once done you take it out/off, place it back in/on and hey! Lookit that. A filesystem is there complete with content.

So would this mean that the USB drive would have to be devoted fully to the ISO, or could I partition it? I use it for things like school work also, so I need like 30-50MB left for myself.

Posted

Yeah, you can partition it. It's after all a harddisk or sorts.

Not sure if an ISO also contains the partition table of the drive though. Probably does. More interestingly, once that data is on there, ISO or not, it's still basically a writeable medium. As long as the filesystem allows it you can add files (iso suggest ISO/UDF filesystem, which don't typically allow this).

Posted

OK, now I've dl'd the file and installed it on my flash drive, but now it throws a kernel panic, and I can't load my preferred ISO.

It throws

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(104,2)

Please append a correct "root=" boot option

Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(104,2)

And I have phlak at /components/phlak-0.3.iso but I can't seem to boot to it.

Posted

Sounds like the kernel you're trying to boot doesn't have USB support.

Posted

Your point being?

The kernel doesn't know what a USB device is it seems. Maybe it was designed to be started from a CDROM.

Posted

OK, time to bump this up. I've dl'd Syslinux and I'm stuck. I have NO idea what to do, and the readmes don't help. I'd like it to be working beore I go back to school monday. Help please?

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