Friday, June 3, 2011

USB rescue drives

Turning a USB thumb drive into a Linux rescue disk from Windows proved to be a little more time consuming that expected. Here's what I've found works:
  1. download the USB Universal Installer from here
  2. run the installer
  3. agree to the licensing terms
  4. select the distro you want (e.g. Ubuntu Rescue Remix 11.04)
  5. if necessary, download the iso (the installer may offer to find the URR iso.. it did for me!)
  6. if necessary, browse to the iso (again, the installer remembered where the URR iso was)
  7. select the thumb drive's drive letter (it should have already been formatted for FAT32)
  8. if desired, set a size for the persistent drive
Once that's done, do this to avoid further frustrations:
  1. browse to syslinux folder on the thumb drive
  2. open the syslinux.cfg file and make sure the initrd option points at /casper/initrd.gz instead of initrd.lz
That should be it, as far as I know.

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