Thanks for all the hard work thats been put into this reference!
I found this document after I had a working Debian USB system looking for flash fstab examples. I had luck installing to a USB key directly from the Debian NetInst disk. Boot up a system from the NetInst disk and a USB key, the installer takes care of most of the rest.
- Make sure to set up / and /boot partitions on the correct device (without swap, of course) and set them up as ext2.
- When setting up GRUB make sure to say no to the first suggestion of installing it on the primary hard disk. After that it asks for the device to install to.
- I did a base + standard + server install and used about 420MB of space on a 1Gig key.
- Now when booting from a different system (for me this was for a mini ITX board) be aware that the GRUB settings will probably be pointing to the wrong devices. You'll need to change the GRUB config to point to the right places, and get rid of reference to the old system.
- Edit /etc/fstab as above, again pointing mounts to the right places, I removed entries for cdrom and floppy since there are none on this system, and added the tmpfs. Also make sure / and /boot are set with noatime.
Netinst option
Thanks for all the hard work thats been put into this reference!
I found this document after I had a working Debian USB system looking for flash fstab examples. I had luck installing to a USB key directly from the Debian NetInst disk. Boot up a system from the NetInst disk and a USB key, the installer takes care of most of the rest.
- Make sure to set up / and /boot partitions on the correct device (without swap, of course) and set them up as ext2.
- When setting up GRUB make sure to say no to the first suggestion of installing it on the primary hard disk. After that it asks for the device to install to.
- I did a base + standard + server install and used about 420MB of space on a 1Gig key.
- Now when booting from a different system (for me this was for a mini ITX board) be aware that the GRUB settings will probably be pointing to the wrong devices. You'll need to change the GRUB config to point to the right places, and get rid of reference to the old system.
- Edit /etc/fstab as above, again pointing mounts to the right places, I removed entries for cdrom and floppy since there are none on this system, and added the tmpfs. Also make sure / and /boot are set with noatime.