Bootable usb
From FoppaWiki
This will decribe how to make a USB flash pendrive memory stick bootable from windows 7. My project was to make a bootable Ubuntu usb stick and I quickly found a guide, actually I went through ALOT of guides, and no matter what I tried, my laptop would fail to boot up with the message "boot error". At first I thought it was my cheap corsair flash voyager stick that was to be blamed, others thought it was my laptop. I knew both worked, since earlier I had Freebsd installation on the stick (made like the freebsd guide on this page describe), and it worked fine.
As stated before I was working on windows 7 and for some reason, the windows disk manager did not let me make a proper partitioning and make that partition active untill I finally found a guide to use diskpart. After this is done, all the guides I have tested again worked perfectly. This worked for all recent (as of june 2010) versions of windows, linux (ubuntu debian centos) and freebsd.
C:\> diskpart DISKPART> list disk DISKPART> select disk 1 DISKPART> clean DISKPART> create partition primary DISKPART> select partition 1 DISKPART> active DISKPART> format fs=fat32 DISKPART> assign DISKPART> exit
Contents |
Linux/ubuntu
Live / Installation
Ive tried both ubuntu and kubuntu and by following guide on http://www.ubuntu.com download page you actually get both live stick and installation option. I have only tried installing from inside the windows manager (kde or gnome) and it worked smoothly.
A very easy tool to make the bootable usb stick on windows, and it can even get the correct iso file for you, can be found at:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/
Windows
Installation
I have only tried to make a bootable windows installation usb stick, this was _very_ easy by making sure you have a partition with same properties as the one I make in the top with diskpart. After that you simply just need to copy the content from the install dvd to the USB, this can be done in UI or with the xcopy command as follows:
c:\> xcopy X:\*.* /s/e/f Y:\
where X:\ is your mounted image or physical DVD and Y:\ is your USB device
FreeBSD
Actually I didnt need anything like the stuff in the top of this article to make a FreeBSD USB stick. But I did need dd for windows, you can find it at http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
Installation
First get the memstick distribution from FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org/where.html
Next figure out where to dd the image:
c:\> dd --list
From the output it should be possible to find the right partition, and from there its just to dd the image to the stick. Use --progress if you want some indication of progress :)
C:\> dd if=8.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 --progress
Live
I haven't tried to actually make the live BSD stick myself, but the following guide looks very much like how mine was made from a friend. I will try and rewrite this based on my own experience in the near future ;)
