Just wondering, has anyone tried to put the ISO on a USB Stick? I.e. you plug in the USB stick and it boot and installs to the existing flash drive or HD?
you don’t “put” iso on a CD anyway. You burn the contents of the ISO to the CD, so putting the file on a USB won’t work. You can use Netinstall to copy the installation files to the USB and then boot from it to run the install, but it will install only on the same USB drive.
… yes, but:
It would be extremely neat and handy to be able to insert a USB stick “with the equivalent of the .ISO”
Boot from USB, run the installer which then puts ROS on the default (main) partition (compact flash or DOM)
I know this is really only an issue for x86-users where netinstall might not be an option … YVMV
Regards
I understand and we’ll see how hard it is to make, but as I said - you can simply place the soon-to-be-router HDD in a windows machine, Netnstall it, move it back to it’s own PC and boot to install. I understand that it’s not so quick as the suggested way, but at least it’s a working way
Brilliant thanks … but IMHO don’t put it too high on the “wish list” because there are lots of other things to add first ..
Regards
Ya I would agree don’t put it high on the list. MLPPP is a much more needed function.
I use USB sticks to install windows, and it works quite well.
And yes, I know you “burn” the ISO, but the question is why can’t you put a ISO on a Flash drive. I can burn a CD ISO on a DVD, so whats the difference? Why would it not see other controllers during an installation?
because ‘burning an iso’ is quite different than copying an iso (to a flash drive). iso is just a container. you would have to get a different kind of image (not an ISO) and then “dd” it to the drive. we don’t provide such images at the moment. we did do it some time ago
Ya, you have to convert the ISO to a VHD file, then extract the BOOT sectors, then place that onto the flash drive THEN, copy the files over. Got it to work, once. lol l 
Oh well. Was an interesting little thought hahah.
Is it possible to boot from CD as usual, but then USB disk to be available in the same way as ATA disk is, so we may simply install there?
yes … it is possible, but unplug the IDE drive before installation, or use Netinstall instead
Great. That is all I would need, and I would try first time I obtain new licence.
I could not figure out how netinstall works.
Netinstall? insert USB device PC, run Netinstall, choose the USB drive as Destination, install. Remove USB device and plug into router ..
Hmm, when I read manual it looks more complex than just that.
Netinstall has many ways of installation.
- Booting from network if your PC supports it.
- Making a boot diskette that will boot from network if your PC doesn’t have native netboot ability
- Installing on a local CF/USB/IDE drive that can be removed and just plugged into a PC to use
Normus, when making the ISO, is it done on Linux? If so, it should be easy to output a .img file, then we could use dd to transfer it to flash. There are gui tools for this too.
Ask the powers that be what they think.
R
For information you can use the zalman ve200 virtual optical disk enclosures to be able to boot from ISO files.
http://linitx.com/product/13354
We use them all the time for OS installs.
Hope that helps
Nick.
The 6.6 ISO boots almost fine if you just make an Easy2Boot USB stick and copy the ISO to the _ISO\MAINMENU folder.
99% of all linux ISOs work with Easy2Boot this way.
However, I get this message:
Looking for harddrives…
Found harddrive as IDE Primary master (disk c)
FATAL ERROR: no CD-ROM found
Press ENTER to reboot
It seems that it is looking for a CD-ROM device only?
I get the same message if I extract the ISO contents to the FAT32 USB flash drive.
6.6 ISO does boot from my Zalman VE-200 OK
Its really very cool feature. I am using it for moving ISO files to a USB flash disk.
you have to emulate the CD to get past this detection.
the zalman virtual image box emulates an usb mass storage device (usb CDROM) which
the the kernel enumerates during the boot process. this is something that most USB
gear does: like the 3G-sticks which have the “driver” diskette embedded, or some promotion
USB drives which are detected as a HDD and a CDrom.
generally booting iso from usb is easy, i did this several times with other “OS” (if you consider windows xp as an OS).
if you have grub or grub4dos you can create a memdisk, which holds the entire contents
of the iso file, promote it to be a drive, and boot off from it. but then it’s just an int13h
device (hard disk).
you can however tweak linux kernel to look for iso-s and mount them while booting:
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK#-_Passing_ISO_parameter_to_the_kernel
it however requires this feature to be compiled in the kernel. but you can give it a try and
modify the kernel boot parameters in the 6.6 ISO file