ArchLinux Floppy & USB Linux Installation

I belive there is a simpler solution to this problem now called Plop Boot Manager witch simply allow you to boot from USB.

So i spent some time yesterday on trying to install my favorite Linux distribution ArchLinux to my very, very old laptop. Mostly as an experiment and to be used very lightly with awesome and terminal based software. This proved to be harder than i had expected.

This old computer doesn’t have anything other than one USB port and a floppy drive and it is not able to boot up from a USB stick. At first i tried to just install grub to a floppy and try to boot up the USB stick directly from grub but i was unsuccessful in that attempt and instead i went with the hard drive installation solution. I downloaded a rescue Linux namely BG-Rescue Linux. After i downloaded the .img files i just put them on two separate floppies like this:

# dd if=rescue-X.Y.Z-1.img of=/dev/fd0
# dd if=rescue-X.Y.Z-2.img of=/dev/fd0

This can also be done in a windows environment, read the documentations on BG-Rescue here.

Now i inserted the first disk on my laptop and followed the instructions on the screen, it is very straightforward. After a while it ask you to insert the second disk and after that you get to a bash shell.

What i needed after this was to be able to apply the ArchLinux USB image to a hard drive so that i could boot up from that. I went around this by downloading the images and adding them to a USB stick. I had trouble because my main computer is running Windows Vista and the USB stick i was using didn’t have a partition that was supported on Windows Vista and if i were to format it in windows vista it didn’t want to mount properly on Linux. This was the solution for me, i inserted the USB stick to my laptop that is now running the rescue Linux and started formatting it to an FAT32 partition (in my case the USB stick comes up as /dev/sda):

# fdisk /dev/sda

Delete any previous partitions using ‘d’ and follow up by making a new one by pressing ‘n’. Make it a primary and full size or whatever you want it to be… After this i press ‘t’ to and choose the ‘b’ for the partition type (Win95 FAT32). Now it’s time to format:

# mkfs -t vfat /dev/sda1

Now i downloaded the ArchLinux USB image from here, and transferred the file using my Windows Vista computer to the USB stick. I think that FTP and Core will work, FTP requires internet connection so i went with core.

After the transfer i put the USB stick back into the old laptop and mounted it to /mnt/mnt1

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/mnt1

Now we can start preparing the hard drive to have an bootable installation partition.

# cd /mnt/mnt1
# fdisk archlinux-2008.06-core-i686.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Now i changed the displayed units to 512 byte sectors.

Command (m for help): u
Changing display/entry units to sectors

And after printing the partition table it looked something like this

Command (m for help): p
 
Disk archlinux-2008.06-core-i686.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
53 heads, 12 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
 
                          Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
archlinux-2008.06-core-i686.img1   *          63      629822      314880   83  Linux
Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(0, 1, 1) logical=(0, 5, 4)
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(39, 52, 12) logical=(990, 15, 3)

Notice two things, The first is the starting location of the partition (63 in this case.) The second is the system type (Linux). We can now quit fdisk

Command (m for help): q

I made sure i had a partition on the hard drive that i was using with fdisk so that it showed up as /dev/hda4, then i could install the installation system to my hard drive

# dd if=archlinux-2008.06-core-i686.img of=/dev/hda4 bs=512 skip=63
629760+0 records in
629760+0 records out
322437120 bytes (322 MB) copied, 19.86 s, 16.2 MB/s

Notice bs=512 and skip=63 witch we got earlier from the ArchLinux image file. Now we can’t install grub to the hard drive because the grub package isn’t included in BG-Rescue Linux so we will have to make a new floppy with grub on, boot that up and then apply the grub setup to the hard drive, i used a Ubuntu live cd and followed this wiki page. And then inserted a menu.lst witch i knew would fail at boot so that i could use the commands. This could be done many ways but i am not going too much into that. Basically what i did was to take the menu.lst from the hard drive…

# mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/mnt2
# cp /mnt/mnt2/boot/grub/menu.lst /mnt/mnt1/menu.lst

Take the USB stick out and insert it into the computer that made the grub floppy, copy over the menu.lst to the floppy and then take the floppy to the old computer, and reboot. When in the grub menu press ‘c’ and do the following commands:

grub> root (hd0,3)
grub> setup (hd0,3)

Press ‘esc’ to go back to the menu and edit any of the lines, to this:

root (hd0,3)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Now press ‘b’ to boot from the hard drive and things will boot up just like it would on a normal CD or USB stick.

Resources: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hard_Disk_Installation