Multi-CD USB stick

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Revision as of 22:39, 8 March 2007 by <bdi>PhilippeTeuwen</bdi> (talk | contribs)
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Well I'm not sure the title speaks for itself...
Live CDs are great and USB sticks have amazing capacities (I'm curious how it'll sound in a couple of years...)
I've bought a 6Gb USB "stick", actually it's a HD in a credit-card format.
The idea is to bring on it and be able to boot:

So I use a single syslinux with a huge configuration file.
Sometimes there are some clashes between the files of the various systems so we've to rename some when possible and choose between some when not possible.

  • syslinux.cfg and isolinux.cfg => merge all and rename some of the targets if needed
  • boot.* => choose one image (I took the Debian spiral from Etch installer) and one text (I list shortly the main targets)
  • F1..F10 help screens => choose or mix

From Etch: this is really the basis of the install, with its syslinux

  • debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso renamed as: debian.iso
  • disk.lbl
  • f1.txt .. f10.txt
  • initrd26.gz
  • initrdg.gz
  • initrd.gz
  • ldlinux.sys (install it properly as a bootable USB stick!)
  • linux
  • linux26
  • splash.rle

From DBAN (dban-1.0.7_i386.ima):

  • dbanlog
  • dbanseed
  • *.txt => dbaninfo/
  • initrd.gz renamed as: initrddb.gz
  • kernel.bzi

From Knoppix DVD:

  • knoppix/
  • balder.img
  • linux renamed as: linux-kn
  • memtest
  • minirt.gz

From FCCU:

  • knoppix/ renamed as: fccu/
  • linux renamed as: lin-fccu
  • minirt.gz renamed as: minifccu.gz (cf note)

Note: For FCCU as we had to rename the directory and as v11 is incompatible with knoppix dvd v5.1.1 I had to change minifccu.gz:

gunzip minifccu.gz
mount -o loop minifccu /mnt/disk

Edit /mnt/disk/linuxrc and prepend the module list by the new path: (but keep the rest!)

MODULE_DIRS="/cdrom/fccu/modules /cdrom/KNOPPIX/modules ...