I was hoping someone could help with a LiveOS on a USB Stick. I managed to get Grub up and going, and I have created a menu.lst and I have it pointed to an iso image. The problem I am having is that it fails to find the image."Looking for cdrom (repeated many times as it looks in all sorts of places) ... Can't find MEPIS FileSystem, Dropping You to a (Very) limited Shell.
To make this a more difficult problem, The same thing happens on a separate laptop (IBM), BUT it does eventually find it and then boots mepis just fine. Is there a way with the very limited shell to find out what /dev/???? the usb stick is for the other computer. I have booted usb sticks on it before too.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I wanted to use AntiX pretty badly, as the one I want to install it on is a P3 700 with 192 MB ram. Not enough to run other distros and AntiX seems to be fully loaded. I have really like what I saw with it on my main pc.

Anticapitalista might be able to help out here as he has just did this. The only thing I can suggest is using the cheat code fromiso and have grub point to /dev/sd?(not sure what it would be on your box, probably sdd). Good luck.

Hello.

I am able to run antiX-M7.2 from a usb jet flash as a livecd. In fact I am typing this from it.

This is how I did it.

1. Use gparted (or whatever tool you prefer) to set up usb stick. Mine came up as sdc

2. Only set one partition and format it as ext3.Make sure it is bootable.

3. You need to extract the livecd part from the iso file.
Open a terminal
sux
pasword
remaster.sh

Follow the instructions until the new-iso file is created, then quit the terminal.

4. Copy the contents of new-iso (not the folder new-iso, just its contents) to your usb partition (it should appear as a folder)

5. You should now have a usb stick which should boot.

Edit: 3 doesn't work properly as it removes the file in the mepis folder which we need.

For 3 follow these steps, in a terminal as root.

#mkdir usb-live
#cd usb-live
#mkdir iso new-iso
#mount -o loop /mnt/sdc/antiX-M7.2.iso iso
#rsync -a iso/ new-iso
#umount iso
#rm iso

Note: Use your path to the antiX-M7.2.iso file

Once finished, do 4.

Thanks AntiC, but that i did that almost exact thing and it still did not work.
The only difference was I formated to EXT2. I have gotten 7.2 to boot in two different ways on my IBM Thinkpad from work. The way you described works great on the Thinkpad, and I also booted just the iso, which I think I like, I am able to put several isos on the Stick. The problem seems to be that the BIOS on the KDS ThinNote 3000 That I am trying to run this on (700Mhz Plll, 192 MB Ram, 8Mb Sillican Motion Lynx3DM (according to A Post in Fedora anyway)). Now to make this more interesting, I downloaded DragonPuppy Linux. I installed it to the usb stick, using superbootdisk. I am able to boot and run this distro on the system. The only thing with it that I can find is that X probe freezes when testing the Video chip. So, I am pretty sure this has something to do with a quirky BIOS. What is the difference between setting up the stick as you said, and the superbootdisk?

I have never tried superbootdisk, so I don't know.

Can you compare DragonPuppy with antiX? I guess Puppy uses isolinux, which is apparently better for old boxes, when booting fromiso or the way I showed.

It must be something to do with the bios, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

I don't even know what it uses, I will check.

Okay, since I am still a newbie, I think it is isolinux, but I am not sure how to find out for sure based off the file structure. But There is no folder for boot and grub. just a thought, I would still like to have antix on the computer how hard would it be somehow put it on the hard drive and boot the iso and then install to the same hard drive? or should I just install it to the hard drive in another computer and let it reset itself when I move it back to the one I want it in? Any ideas? or is there something else that anyone can think of. I cannot install from cd, and the usb for antix is finicky on this computer.

Just wanted to say, I got it AntiX working on my laptop. I just got it working, Now I have to configure it. __{{emoticon}}__

But I just wanted to say, thanks for the help and Tell you what I ended up doing. I used puppy linux, since it did boot the pc, and I gparted and created two partions. one small one and one large one. I put the iso on the small one. then I installed grub to the hard disk. Then I edited the menu list to have grub boot the iso from the hard disk, and voila. Just an FYI, I had a time getting all that to work. Most likely because it is the first time I have ever done any of that. The grub shell is very limited, but was very helpful. Anyway I am sure you will hear more from me. I have a wireless card, that I am sure I am going to need help getting to work. Thanks

That was a really good solution and very useful for others to try that may also have problems getting antiX to boot on a usb stick.
Thanks for the tip, and have fun with antiX.

anticapitalista wrote:Hello.


3. You need to extract the livecd part from the iso file.
Open a terminal
sux
pasword
remaster.sh

Follow the instructions until the new-iso file is created, then quit the terminal.

At this point is the antiX live cd supposed to be in the cdrom drive or does the script make an iso from the antiX install?
Thanks!

The script should ask you to choose a path to an iso file or from a cd. At the moment the remaster script doesn't create a bootable install of your installation.

There may be better instructions in this thread at MepisLovers.

(It's busy)