Making Bootable Pendrive ! Help needed

[Dark_Star]

Well I have been acting very lazy these day neither i have updated my Bios nor I am finishing linuxforyou and linux-magazine article request...

I have messed my partition table but thankfully mandriva read it .. but it doesn't seems testdisk will be doing the job this time..So I had to take backup and format whole thing

Now I am not here to ask help abt restoring table.. I was thinking of updating my BIOS as of now.. I have never done iit but have got a lot of help from frnds ... http://www.techenclave.com/cpu-mobo-...os-134345.html

The problem is that I have never created any bootable usb in Linux so I am pretty unaware, nor the solution listed in the above thread is available for Linux.. Is there a way of creating all those mentioned thing in Linux . easy steps would be appreciated.

So before I get started I want to finish this BIOS mess and fix the screen tearing issue , the new BIOS will provide value added options, so please help me if you know the steps..Ohh BTW my MB supports booting from pen drives and other external drives so thats not an issue !

I see there are options in gparted to format to FAT but no flags to make it MS-DOS bootable ...

Any help would be appreciated .. I can't do windows installation atm.. Partition table is corrupted and USB didn't get detected in Vbox So please guide me so that I can finish off things...

Regards

[StringCheesian]

I once got it to work by using dd to copy a floppy image over the usb stick. You end up with a weird usb stick that thinks it's only 1.4 megs in size (probably due to how the msdos filesystem was formatted in the image), but it works (it will be bootable).

There are lots of bootable floppy images all over the internet.

[Dark_Star]

Bumpp... Please help guys ..

[Kano]

There is an extra easy way to get USB drives bootable: get a (DOS) FLOPPY image and copy it 1:1 on it, then USB ZIP would be the correct selection. Otherwise you can use any bootloader to a partitioned drive like syslinux or grub 1/2. Another simple way is to use a DOS disk image, then you loop mount it, add the bios.rom + flash tool + autoexec.bat, then you do:

mkisofs -b boot.img -o boot.iso boot.img

In that example the floppy image is called boot.img of course. Then you get a bootable iso, which you just burn.

[chithanh]

You can turn any live CD image which uses ISOLINUX 3.72 or later into an usb image using the isohybrid utility. Afterwards just dd onto a partition on the usb stick, making sure the partition is marked bootable and you have a proper MBR.

EDIT: oops, I missed that you want to make it MSDOS bootable. In that case you can just dd a FreeDOS boot floppy image onto it, or use MEMDISK.

[suokko]

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

or http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo (liveusb-creator)

[berthani]

What is the best partition to use on a usb pen drive? I have a 8gb pen drive I use for my all sorts of portability. i also transfer big files like .ISO files of 2gb or 4gb.
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[lordmozilla]

What is the best partition to use on a usb pen drive? I have a 8gb pen drive I use for my all sorts of portability. i also transfer big files like .ISO files of 2gb or 4gb.

fat32. Works everywhere. ext2 if you don't use windows. Dont go putting an indexed filesystem on a usb stick.