[finnix] usb thumbdrive without formatting / partitioning?

[Ryan Finnie]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Geoffrey Lane <freeballer at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm looking to replace another distro, want debian based cause of ease of
> update/installing. I always keep a 4gb drive on me, for emergencies, backup,
> and general use.. This is where my last distro was housed.
> I realize there is a cheatcode/command to install on thumbdrive.... but I DO
> NOT want to haveto backup->restore this drive to install the distro. My
> first question of course is will it boot from vfat32 drive? If so, anybody
> made a howto on how to accomplish this without backup/erasure/hair
> pulling/cursing?

There's a reason why finnix-thumbdrive wants to format, and it's not
just because I'm a jerk.  The partition has to be in a very specific
format to get BIOSes to boot from it, and just copying the files on
won't do it.  See http://syslinux.zytor.com/usbkey.php for an
explanation; finnix-thumbdrive just does all of the hard work for you.

Another annoying limitation rising from that is that the bootable
partition can't be more than 1GB.  If you have a 4GB thumbdrive,
you'll need to throw the "-l" flag to finnix-thumbdrive, which will
limit sdX4 to a 1GB partition.  HOWEVER, you can then just go into
fdisk and create sdX1 with the rest of the space.

Once you get the partition properly created though, you don't have to
destroy every time you want to put a new distro on it.  Just use the
"-p" flag in finnix-thumbdrive and it'll assume you already have a
properly-formatted partition.

Ryan