How To: Make GRUB Thumb Drive

[Qqmike]

Re: How To: Make GRUB Thumb Drive

I haven't experimented with that, but have run into lots of How-To's targeted at it, notably this one:

If your BIOS does not support booting from USB, see this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromUSB

That will give you an idea of the issues and workaround.
Good Luck! (Looks like a lot of work, but I
gave it to one guy @Ubuntu forums who made it go just right for him.)

[Qqmike]

Re: How To: Make GRUB Thumb Drive

2-12-09

Major re-write/improvement of the basic how-to:

How To Make a GRUB Flash Drive.
(Optional: GParted Live on Flash Drive.)
--- A toolkit for building bootable flash drives

Should also serve as a toolkit for building GRUB-bootable flash drives.
Lots of tips, techniques.

Reply #1 will still be maintained, too:
How to Install Kubuntu to an External USB HDD

The original post is retained and is appended at the end of the new version.

TABLE of CONTENTS

Abbreviations

1 How-to do it: The basic how-to
2 Notes -- details, tips, options, methods, additional information
3 USB drive shifting: Very important!
=> the key to understanding how to use flash drives and external drives
Super Grub Disk for USB -- usbshift -- special command for dealing with drive shifting
4 Appendix: Put GParted in the same partition with SGD
Alternate way to partition for GParted: Put it in with SGD in partition 1
You do not need a separate partition for GParted.
Adjustments you need to make.
5 REFERENCES

List of Notes
Note 1: BIOS issues, assumptions: “Boot from USB”
Note 2: Compressed files (bz2 & bzip) and using Ark in Kubuntu
Note 3: Using the special SGD USB
Note 4: Use K3b (in Kubuntu) to burn your GParted Live CD
Note 5: How to zero-out your flash drive
Note 6: Setting labels at the command line
Note 7: Open a file manager as root
Note 8: Copying hidden folders and files in GUI and CLI
Note 9: Accessing files on a downloaded iso file (without burning a CD)
Note 10: Find out how Kubuntu & GRUB see the flash drive
Note 11: Using GParted Live CD -- logistics
Note 12: md5sum (of downloaded files)

[dibl]

Re: How To: Make GRUB Thumb Drive

Excellent guide -- nice job, Mike. Thanks!

[Qqmike]

Re: How To: Make GRUB Thumb Drive

GParted on your GRUB flash drive:
Latest versions:
(in testing) See GParted 0.4.3: bug fixes to 0.4.2

This is still in testing, but will be a major revision.
I just tested it on the flash drive build (of this thread-see the first post), and it works perfectly.
You do not have to change anything we did in building the flash drive:

Use a GParted Live CD to reformat that partition as FAT32 (to "get rid of" the previous contents); or, simply remove what's there in GUI or at Konsole. Then copy the new GParted files into the GParted partition -- no change to GRUB; no change to any menu.ls's. Re-boot, and off you go.

NOTE: This newest version is not yet available in a stable live CD -- it is still in testing as of the date of my post here, but when it's ready, you'll be ready.