How to boot Linux from a 16gb USB flash drive
- by Chris Harris
I'm trying to install Linux on a single partition of a USB flash drive that's larger than 4gb.
The first place I went to is http://pendrivelinux.com. I can follow these instructions for installing Xubuntu 9.04 perfectly, which unfortunately break down when I try to scale it up beyond 4gb.
There are several other tools to do this (unetbootin and usb-creator) which follow a very similar formula.
I figured out that a big problem of mine was that all of these tools assume the USB drive is formatted in FAT32, which unfortunately cannot hold a single file larger than 4gb. This is unfortunate because I want to use just one partition, so that my persistance file, casper-rw, looks like one big partition to the OS once I've booted off of the USB drive.
I then tried following a myriad of instructions involving formatting the drive as one large ext2 filesystem and using extlinux to create a single bootable ext2 file system.
This doesn't work for me however, after about 20 attempts verifying and slightly tweaking the formula, I cannot seem to get a "good" bootable ext2 file system built. I'm not entirely sure what's going on, but it seems as though no matter how hard I try, I cannot get the ext2 file system to remain coherent after copying the Linux ISO contents over, copying the MBR, and executing extlinux to create the ext bootloader.
Every time, after I follow these steps (in any order) and reboot, I get an unbootable USB drive. If I then mount the drive under Linux again, I see a mess of a file system (inodes have clearly been screwed up somewhere along the way).
I suspected that the USB drive wasn't being fully flushed, so I tried using the "sync" and "unmount" commands before rebooting which didn't affect things at all.
I guess I have several possible questions - but let's start with the obvious - is there something I'm missing to create a bootable ext2 USB flash drive that's large (e.g. 16gb)?
