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Fedora 8 on a USB stick

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by Harald Hoyer — last modified Apr 06, 2008 12:12

A USB stick with the latest rawhide, which will soon turn into the Fedora 8 release.

Fedora 8 on a USB stick

Today I downloaded the latest pre-Fedora-8 rawhide live image, burned it on CD, booted from CD and installed the image on a 4GB USB stick. After that, I was able to boot from the stick entirely without a harddisk. Very handy to test things and show it to friends. Let's see how many write actions my stick can take :-)

 

 

Update 06.04.2008:

Live USB Persistence

Support for persistent changes with a Live image exists for Fedora 9. The primary use case is booting from a Live image on a USB flash drive and storing changes to that same device. To do this, download the Live image and then run the following command: 

livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 512 /path/to/live.iso /dev/sdb1

Replace /dev/sdb1 with the partition where you want to put the image.

Replace 512 with the desired size in megabytes of the persistent data, or overlay. The livecd-iso-to-disk shell script is stored in the LiveOS directory at the top level of the CD image. The USB media must have sufficient free space for the Live image, plus the overlay, plus any other data to be stored on the media.

See also: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo

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install without burning on CD?

Posted by fujisan at Oct 23, 2007 15:15
Can you install it on the usb stick without burning it on CD?

Re: install without burning on CD?

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Oct 23, 2007 15:17
There is a HowTo on how to transfer the live image on the stick http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo
But that does not give you a real installation. Just a live system in read-only mode, like the LiveCD.

Fedora 8 on a stick

Posted by Sean McGuffee at Nov 11, 2007 14:44
Hi, I looked up Fedora 8 memory stick installation, and this is what I found. What I really wanted was to avoid using a CD to boot because who has a CD? I certainly wouldn't want to mess with the BS involved in writing to a CD from windows. Anyway, I have a USB drive and even a simple dos program to write to that drive in a way that allows booting (it's something like DD.exe that I downloaded). Anyway, I remember that I had a boot disk file that I put on my memory stick that allowed a network install of FC7. I tried the same one with a web address of FC8. Although it appeared to be working, it just hung instead of completing. Does anyone know if I just used the wrong web address (even though it appeared to be downloading image.2.img or whatever), or if I need to get a special installation file for FC8 for my USB disk? If so, where can I get it?

Fedora 8 install from USB

Posted by Michael Hartley at Feb 27, 2008 14:29
Hi

this is the solution for Fedora 8. It's not perfect but it works.

1. Download the Fedora DVD ISO
2. Get yourself a 4gb USB drive or USB harddisk.
3. Create two Win95 FAT16 partitions on the USB device, the first 20mb and the second the remainder of the drive.
4. Mark the first partition bootable.
5. dd if=diskboot.img of=dev/sda1 where you downloaded diskboot.img from a Fedora mirror or you extracted the file from the ISO using WINRAR on Win XP.
6. mount the second USB partion.
eg
mkdir /mnt/u2
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/u2
7. Copy the DVD ISO to the second partition. Don't DD the ISO, just plain simple copy.
eg. cp Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso /mnt/u2
8. Leave the USB device in the computer and reboot; may need to adjust the BIOS on start up so that the boot order recognises it should start from the USB device.
9. The USB device partition 1 will boot and you will be offered an introduction. Follow the instructions and navigate the HDD install menu to /dev/sda2 (your USB device). This will detect your Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso and boot it.
10. Following the installation instructions generated by Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso
11. Over to you.

Kind regards

Michael.

usk boot

Posted by Baya at Nov 07, 2008 12:15
Would you please let lme how to adjust the BIOS on start up so that the boot order recognises it should start from the USB device. Thank you.

booting Linux from USB

Posted by Baya OUSSENA at Dec 15, 2008 08:42
Just to say thank for the instruction you gave to boot Linux from USB. I went thought many proposition i found on the net, yours ha been the most succeful. All went ok, thought i had to make the second partition file system ext2, it didn't work with FAT, the boot couldn't find the iso.

Dr Baya Oussena
Computer Scientist
Mainz University.



Fedora 10 or 9 install from USB

Posted by Galder Zamarreno at Dec 31, 2008 15:09
Based on the instructions by Michael, I've written a blog entry with detailed explanation on how to install Fedora 10 or 9 from USB stick. See: http://galder.zamarreno.com/?p=244

was it a real installation?

Posted by Victor Olvera at Oct 30, 2007 07:41
I have a similar question as Herald... when will Fedora be able to do a real install to a USB-Stick. I am assuming you did the liveCD to disk thing on yours. Also, I just want to make sure, can you save changes on this new liveCD?

and how come I keep hearing people say "avoid your write actions" when talking about liveUSB stuff? I thought USB sticks were as reliable as harddrives...


Fedora 8 on a USB stick

Posted by Jim Anthony at Nov 02, 2007 08:43
Flash memory (the type in a USB memory stick) can only be written to a limited number of times before they fail (~100,000 to millions). However they can be read a limitless number of times. The solution is to set up a ram disk and use that for normal activities and then dump the ram disk to the USB key when shutting down.

Re: was it a real installation?

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Nov 02, 2007 08:43
Yes, it was a _real_ installation! And Fedora _can_ do this already. Though it kind of hardcoded the root partition location.

"Avoid your write actions" is because cheap and older sticks can only take a limited amount of write actions in their lifetime.

update fails

Posted by niksox at Apr 15, 2008 18:16
i tried latest rawhide live images. Everything is fine except that when i tried to update whole system it freezes at some point with read/write errors. Is this supposed to work? (updates were 250mb) my stick is 4G and i use 1G overlay.

Re: update fails

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Apr 15, 2008 18:17
Maybe your stick has reached its end of life? Or the 1GB overlay is full..