https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=677246 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=677246#c2 --- Comment #2 from Marcus Schaefer <ms@novell.com> 2011-03-07 19:24:04 UTC --- community report:

We have needed a bootable usbstick carrying an installable system. We do it like this:

1. The usb stick has *no* partition and is formatted FAT32, so it can be handled by Windows.

2. The usbstick contains a. a live image, which contains the root file system of the "live" system. It consists of 3 files 1 rootfs.raw 2 vmlinuz 3 initrd b. a target image, maybe specialized to the particular target hardware in question 4 target.raw.gz c. syslinux 5. syslinux.cfg etc. d. install-to-disk script

The usbstick is made bootable, booting from the stick will start syslinux, which in turn will load the kernel (2), the initial ram disk (3) and loop mount the rootfs.raw as READ ONLY. A writeable layer is added using aufs.

The content of the stick itself is made available as /usb/1. The install-to-disk script is called like any application and will install the target.raw.gz image to the disk in the target system. The install-to-disk script will analyze the disk size, calculate sizes of the desired partitions. The image is installed using gzip -cd target.raw.gz | dd of=/dev/sdXXX bs=1M Then the partition table is corrected using fdisk or similar, and after that fsck and resize2fs will expand the root fs to its final size.

The driving reason for doing it this way was, that the boot stick is created on a Windows system, which is not under our control. So using ext2fsd or similar on Windows was no option.

The above mentioned images are all created using kiwi.

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https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=677246 https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=677246#c3 Marcus Schaefer <ms@novell.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Status|ASSIGNED |RESOLVED Resolution| |FIXED --- Comment #3 from Marcus Schaefer <ms@novell.com> 2011-03-09 10:58:13 UTC --- Thanks for the valuable input about the USB stick creation. I have patched kiwi to create Windows friendly sticks now Basically you have two options to create the stick image which should be shown in the following Examples: 1) <type image="usb" filesystem="ext3" boot="usbboot/suse-11.3"/> kiwi --prepare ... --root /tmp/kiwi-11.3 kiwi --create /tmp/kiwi-11.3 -d /tmp/mytest/ --type usb ==> plug in the stick kiwi \ --bootstick /tmp/mytest/initrd-usbboot-suse-11.3.i686-2.1.1.splash.gz \ --bootstick-system /tmp/kiwi-11.3 --fat-storage 300 * This example requires a linux machine to deploy on the stick * The --fat-storage option allows to specify the size of the fat partition usable by Windows as data container (default 60M) * fat partition is first partition 2) <type image="oem" filesystem="ext3" boot="oemboot/suse-11.3"> ... optional oem and systemdisk settings </type> kiwi --prepare ... --root /tmp/kiwi-11.3 kiwi --create /tmp/kiwi-11.3 -d /tmp/mytest/ \ --type oem --fat-storage 300 * This example creates a virtual oem disk (expandable) and thus can be deployed with dd or with Matt's image writer tool on Windows too on first boot the stick is resized according to the oem options set in config.xml * The --fat-storage option allows to specify the size of the fat partition usable by Windows as data container (default 60M) * fat partition is first partition -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.