From How do I get a USB thumb drive to boot with grub2?
Thumb drive appears as /dev/sdb
Run these commands
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt/$i; done
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sdb
update-grub
Then edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Changed all lines that say (hd1,1) to (hd0,1)
note by acidzombie I ignored what is to the right of the comma and it said sdb for me instead end note
Then run...
exit
for i in /dev/pts /dev /proc /sys; do sudo umount /mnt/$i ; done
Next.
- List item
- Totally power down the server.
- Pull the power cords out. Wait 10s.
- Plug power back in.
- Insert Thumb drive and power on.
- Linux now boots fully from the thumb drive.
It seems that there were two problems. They were to do with having the wrong device referenced in grub.cfg (i.e. hd1 should be hd0).
Secondly, a bug in the server bios. It kept referring to a uuid for a filesystem on a different thumb drive that I'd be earlier playing with. Warm reboot seemed to keep that uuid in there. A cold boot fixed it.
dd if=iso of=/dev/sdb/
then booted up said usb stick. After it copied or 'installed' the files to the USB it had some kind of GRUB setup phase which I thought was weird. I can't boot up the USB – user4069 Aug 10 '13 at 22:58dd
on osx, could never make anything bootable out of it. I've created a live-usb from linux only once I think with uunetbootin, otherwise i've always used the pendrive tool in windows and never tried from scratch in linux - surely you must be using an iso that is already tailored for usb. I think the issue is making it bootable not grub, but again, newbie here. You may find this useful. Good luck! – user44370 Aug 11 '13 at 2:11