Whats the trick to getting Linux to boot when its installed on a USB drive?

[thedarkwolf]

Rightnow I am working with Mandrake but I have tried this with several others aswell. My computer supports booting from USB so I don't understand why this is being such a bitch. Aslong as the distribution I try sees the external drive I have no problems installing it but as soon as I reboot it just stalls with a L, for LILO?, or with GRUB, when I use grub, on the screen. I am installing the boot loaders on the external drive is that the problem? I want to use this at work and want to keep the work computer totally linux free so no boot loaders on their hardrives.

My boot order is CD, USB, then HD if that matters for some reason.

 

[Dragonbate]

Cool project... I read a while back that this is unofficially supported by knoppix. I don't recalll but I think there was some issue about how you have to format the usb drive to make it bootable.

 

[Anubis08]

What command are you using to tranfer the OS to the drive. In an earlier post someone gave complete directions for doing this with slax. It was not too long ago so you should be able to find it.

 

[thedarkwolf]

I am just installing it right to the usb drive no fancy commands or anything.

 

[Anubis08]

How exactly are you making it bootable then?

 

[Anubis08]

look here and here. Hope this helps.

 

[thedarkwolf]

The sameway I would if I were installing it to a regular drive. With whatever partition managerthe install program uses. I just tell it to make it bootable.

BTW it just started working for no apparent reason. I am typing this from Konqueror . Not really sure what I did that made it work. I just had the drive plugged in when I rebooted from windows to check something out and it booted up. I did run some program I found called syslinux that is suppose to make it bootable but it just come up with an error but maybe it worked.

http://syslinux.zytor.com/