[gentoo-user] LiveUSB booting a USB harddrive

[gentoo-user] LiveUSB booting a USB harddrive

[Nick]

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Hi there,

I've been reading the LiveUSB docs at
www.gentoo.org/docs/en/liveusb.xml

Rather than booting a livecd from a USB stick, however, I'd like to
do so from a USB Hard Drive. The sensitive thing here is I just want
a 1GB partition on this drive as a "rescue" disk of sorts -- the
rest of the drive has lots of important data, which I really can't
lose.

So, if I follow the commands at the doc mentioned above, should all
work fine? the dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda (or
whatever) is of particular concern, as it's a scary command to run
on a disk with non backed-up data on it (no, I currently have no
real backup of the disk - 180GB to backup is too expensive for me)

Thanks in advance,

Nick

P.S. Without meaning to sound like a fanboy, I started using Gentoo
not so long ago, and it's the best thing ever, far exceeding even
sliced bread.

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Re: [gentoo-user] LiveUSB booting a USB harddrive

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Hi,

On Tue, 15 May 2007 20:03:15 +0100
Nick <gentoo-user@njw.me.uk> wrote:

> So, if I follow the commands at the doc mentioned above, should all
> work fine? the dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda (or
> whatever) is of particular concern, as it's a scary command to run
> on a disk with non backed-up data on it (no, I currently have no
> real backup of the disk - 180GB to backup is too expensive for me)

So make a backup of the relevant part first. Check for the length
of /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin and make a backup: 
"dd if=/dev/sda of=/my-mbr-mackup bs=1024 count=1" (insert correct
count according to that mentioned file size).

But why not just use grub and bother with syslinux instead? But it
boils down to be a matter of taste, I guess...

-hwh
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