[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to create a bootable USB stick on OI?

[Jim Klimov]

2012-08-20 18:37, Gary Mills пишет:
> What if I really do want to create a bootable USB stick.  Is this
> possible on OI?

I believe, in this case the stick's contents should look like
a bootable device to the computer's BIOS. Usually this means
that some program is available starting at sector zero, and
by reading and executing it, the computer goes on to find and
boot the OS - just like with a diskette, hard-drive, etc.

Particular implementations usually differ in that either an
USB stick emulates a HDD - complete with an MBR partition
table, including the few bytes to point to a bootloader image
like GRUB - or a floppy disk with an FS starting right away
and covering the whole device (with the pointer to bootloader
being a small part of the FS header in the first sector).

True, I did not try to do this on OI. Still, following the
scent of OI LiveUSB creation suggestions, you can download
an image of the MBR with bootloader for a 1Gb or 2Gb stick,
and the image, I believe, includes a definition for a primary
partition of the named size. Then you DD the *.USB image onto
the partition which now is defined on the stick.

In case of FreeDOS image, you mkfs a FAT (pcfs) filesystem
on this partition, mount it and copy over the files.
Likely you can just dd an image of the floppy onto this
partition instead, and be done with it :\

Alternately, some Linux-based LiveCDs include ways to boot
an unaltered ISO image from a USB stick; I believe this is
done with utilities from syslinux (which practically translate
into binary images of appropriate bootloaders).

HTH,
//Jim