I was recently examining, how to boot a (live) KNOPPIX from an USB stick. It turns out I did not find a manual about how to create a bootable USB stick containing KNOPPIX without burning KNOPPIX to a CD/DVD first?! So this is a short howto without burning anything. I'm showing how to put a KNOPPIX ISO image to an USB stick. I need an ISO image of KNOPPIX, an USB stick and syslinux installed. I've chosen to put the 4GB DVD image KNOPPIX_V7.2.0DVD-2013-06-16-EN.iso onto a 16GB USB stick. The place left on the USB device should be available to the user as NTFS partition. I'll use the term /dev/sdX to refer to the stick (where X is a lowercase character, e.g. /dev/sdb) and completely empty it first (THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA INCLUDING THE PARTITION TABLE!):
shred -z /dev/sdXNow after the ISO image has been downloaded, we need to alter it a bit. For this some information about the USB stick is required. The relevant bits heads and sectors/track are highlighted below:
fdisk -l /dev/sdX
Disk /dev/sdX: 16.0 GB, 16008609792 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15267 cylinders, total 31266816 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Now we change the ISO image for hybrid mode:
isohybrid -o 1 -h 64 -s 32 -e 1 KNOPPIX_V7.2.0DVD-2013-06-16-EN.isoand copy the ISO image to the USB stick:
cat KNOPPIX_V7.2.0DVD-2013-06-16-EN.iso > /dev/sdXAfter the command has succeeded, the partition table will show a bootable "Hidden HPFS/NTFS" partition. Note that you can adjust the partition type by using the -t, --type switch of isohybrid.
fdisk -l /dev/sdX
Disk /dev/sdX: 16.0 GB, 16008609792 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15267 cylinders, total 31266816 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdX * 1 8032255 4016127+ 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
Now we can create one or more partitions on the stick for shipping data or $whatever by using fdisk, e.g. create a new primary partition and set the type to HPFS/NTFS/exFAT:
fdisk /dev/sdX
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdX: 16.0 GB, 16008609792 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15267 cylinders, total 31266816 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x12345678
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdX * 1 8032255 4016127+ 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
Command (m for help): n
Partition type:
p primary (1 primary, 0 extended, 3 free)
e extended
Select (default p): p
Partition number (1-4, default 2): 2
First sector (8032256-31266815, default 8032256):
Using default value 8032256
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G} (8032256-31266815, default 31266815):
Using default value 31266815
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 2
Hex code (type L to list codes): 7
Changed system type of partition 2 to 7 (HPFS/NTFS/exFAT)
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdX: 16.0 GB, 16008609792 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15267 cylinders, total 31266816 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x12345678
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdX1 * 1 8032255 4016127+ 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdX2 8032256 31266815 11617280 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Command (m for help): w
[..]
Run mkfs.ntfs on /dev/sdX2 to create the NTFS file system there. The USB stick is ready now. Connected to the system where one wants to start a live KNOPPIX and chosen to boot this system from USB will result in a running KNOPPIX system.
The same should also work for creating a Debian live system USB stick. Thanks to the author of this article.
