Anybody been able to make the LiveCD iso into a bootable flash drive yet?

I'm still kinda green to linux, so when it comes to this kinda thing I need a bit of hand-holding. I downloaded the ISO (the Gem 1.0 stable version), which I presume is a Live/bootable CDROM image. I also downloaded Flashboot. It's a program custom-tailored for this sort of thing. One of the things it can do is take a bootable ISO image and make a bootable flash-drive with it. Problem is, when I try it with the Elive ISO, it gives me an error message:

"Error: Specified CD-ROM disk or image file is neither ISOLinux-based nor floppy emulation mode bootable CD-ROM; thus it cannot be converted"

In the ISO image itself are two folders, one "isolinux" and one "isolinux.bak". That makes me think it IS an isolinux bootable CDROM, but Flashboot ain't really getting it.

Anybody know what I'm doing wrong with Flashboot, or if not that program, anybody been able to put together a LiveCD/Flash Drive with ANY method? I KNOW it's got to be possible. With BartPE you can make a Windows XP LiveCD, so it stands to reason that it's gotta be do-able in this situation too, but I'm just not guru-enough on my own to figure out how.

Really if it's too big a problem for too long, I'll just burn a CD and do it the way I'm supposed to, but I'm getting really sick of burning discs just to TEST a new distro. 99% of 'em just end up in the trash afterwards. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use my flash-drive to test new distros and only actually BURN whichever one I decide I like enough to keep.

Any help appreciated. Thx very much. :-)



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2008 09:09PM by dcorleone.

This issue that you have is not related to Elive.

you can find great [www.pendrivelinux.com]

You can open the ISO image in an archive manager and extract the files onto your USB drive.

Then get this archive:
[dl.getdropbox.com]

Extract that onto the drive.

Now you need to do some manual labor
figure out which device your usb drive is - type mount
in my case it was /dev/sdc1
Use your own device here it might be something other than sdc1

Now type this:

sudo syslinux /dev/sdXN

Where X is the letter of the drive and N is the number of the drive.
For this to work your usb drive needs to be FAT formatted.

either use a filemanager or do it manually in the terminal

go to the boot directory of the usb drive
copy the vmlinuz image and paste it again and rename the copy of it to only "vmlinuz"
do the same thing with the initrd

in my case:

cp vmlinuz-2.6.25.16-elive-686 vmlinuz

and

cp initrd.img-2.6.25.16-elive-686 initrd

unmount the drive and try to boot from your other computer.

NOTE:
I have had the language settings set to danish (since I am danish), however you can change that either permanently in the syslinux.cfg or by pressing tab when the bootmenu appears and change dk to something useful to you

change "lang=dk" to "lang=XX"

Where XX is your country code.

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ELive 1.9.16

Actually there's a project called unetbootin that has made a special version for Elive, this tool is better to use from a windows machine, very userfriendly and automatized:

[unetbootin.sourceforge.net]

If there's any bug, please report it to the unetbootin project, we would like to have a direct download of this tool on the Elive website for the next stable release

Hehe - nice

I only wish I knew this before I used some time on recreating a menu in syslinux

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ELive 1.9.16

is there a way to make this installation persistent?