The following sequence of helper commands will create a basic USB/HDD image containing just the Debian standard system without X.org. It is suitable for booting from USB sticks, USB hard drives, and various other portable storage devices.
Note if you created an iso image with the previous example, you will need to
clean up your working directory with the lh clean
helper command (see Section 4.1.3, “The lh clean
helper”):
$ lh clean --binary
Run the lh config
helper command with the parameters to
configure the "config/"
hierarchy to create a USB/HDD
image type:
$ lh config -b usb-hdd
Now build the image with the lh build
helper command:
# lh build
The generated binary image contains a VFAT partition and
the syslinux bootloader, ready to be directly written on
an USB stick. Plug in an USB stick with a size larger than that of
binary.img
and type:
$ dd if=binary.img of=${USBSTICK}
where ${USBSTICK}
is the device file of your key,
like /dev/sdb
(not a partition like
/dev/sdb1
!); you can find the right device name by
looking in dmesg's output after plugging in the stick,
for example.
In order to test the USB/HDD image with VMware Workstation:
Run VMware Workstation:
Write the image to an usb stick. In VMware, click on Edit virtual machine settings in VM summary page. Then, add a new physical harddisk device and enter the device node of your usb stick.
If you want to use the remaining free space after you have installed the
binary.img
, you can use a partitioning tool such as
gparted or parted to create a new partition on the stick. The first
partition will be used by the Debian Live system.
# gparted ${USBSTICK}
After the creation of the partition you have to create a filsystem on it. One possible choice would be ext2 (ext3 isn't recommended because the journaling causes too many writes to the stick).
# mkfs.ext2 ${USBSTICK}
If you want to use this data partition with Windows, use FAT32.
# mkfs.vfat -F 32
FIXME: Describe installing Debian Live to a partition (e.g. /dev/sdc1) AND using a bootloader to boot this.