install ubuntu from usb stick
i bought me a “Gigabyte GA-GC230D, Atom 230″ motherboard some weeks ago and now i finally had time to install linux on it. i was a bit surprised how much of a torture this was. there are lots of quite specific howtos but still it took me hours of trying. in the end it was quite easy, but you have to know how. here is a list of sources i used but none of them did it by itself.
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installation from usb stick
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preparing the usb stick
at first, i created a single partition, there is usually already one on an usb stick. it has to be at least the size of two cds. then i formated it like:sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdx1 whereas /dev/sdx1 is the partition of the usb stick. be careful not to format accidentally another partition if yo have serial-ata or scsi disks. i accidentally formated my swap space :-) you can find out your usb device by typing:
sudo fdisk -l
copy the files
you need to get an iso image of an install cd. i got the ubuntu 8.10 server image. after downloading i created a directory, mounted the iso to this directory and copied all the files to the usb stick. it is probably not necessary to copy all files to the stick but i was to lazy to test whats exactly necessary. the path of the usb stick was in my case /media/disk.
mkdir ubuntuImage
mount -o loop /path/to/iso-image ubuntuImage
cd ubuntuImage
cp -Rf * /media/disk
cp -Rf .disk /media/disk
cp -Rf isolinux /media/disk/syslinux
cd /media/disk/syslinux
mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg
thats it, the files are on the stick. during the installation there was a problem copying files from the stick. i solved it by making a copy of /media/disk/dists/intrepid to stable. on the cd there was a symbolic link to stable, this is not possible on a fat filesystem.
cp -R /media/disk/dists/intrepid /media/disk/dists/stable
to “fix” another problem occurring later, copy the whole iso image to the stick too.
make the drive bootable
to install the bootloader you need a command called syslinux. it does some magic to the usb stick. to install it type:sudo apt-get install syslinux mtools
if your usb stick is mounted, unmount it.
use
sudo syslinux /dev/sdx1
to finally install the bootloader.
to be sure your stick has a proper master boot record use:
install-mbr /dev/sdx
booting from the stick
in the bios i had to activate an option called “legacy USB storage detect” and select USB-ZIP as boot device. after that ubuntu booted and the installer started. the first problem occurred when it tried to load the cd. it just wasn’t able to do this. with alt-f2 you can switch to the console and mount the “cdrom” manually by typingmount -t vfat /dev/sdx1 /cdrom
go back to the installer with alt-f1, try the failed step again and it should now work. after setting up network and disk there will occur another error. when trying to install the base system a message “Failed to determine codename for the release” will appear. go back to the install menu and select “load installer components from cd”. select the iso option and it will find the image and the installation should continue without problems.