Booting from USB with Grub2
                ===========================
                         2011-01-14


I wanted to  check  out  LiveUSB-OpenBSD  [1],  because  I'm
pondering  about  switching  to   OpenBSD   for   my   daily
desktop.  However, my stubborn laptop  acted  up  again  and
refused to boot from the USB drive I carefully  put  OpenBSD
on.  So I decided to take a trip  down  search  engine  lane
and see what different ways there are to boot  from  a  usb.
It appears you can easily boot from a USB drive  with  Grub2
and  here's  how to:

- Boot into Grub and press c to get into the command line

-  If  you're  running  Trisquel  like  I  am,   you'll   be
  confronted with  a  user/password  question  you  probably
  haven't seen before.  Don't panic, you are (probably)  not
  an amnesiac.  Trisquel automatically generates a  password
  for  you  when  you  install  this  sweet  flower  of  the
  GNU/Linux garden. You can find it in
  /etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD.  If you want to get rid of it you
  can  comment  everything  in  that  file  and  run   "sudo
  update-grub".  But since  I  like  this  whole  secure  by
  default thing - which is one of  the  reasons  I  want  to
  check out OpenBSD - I decided to just use the  login  name
  and password mentioned in the file.

- When you're logged in you'll see a shell which you can use
  to do all kinds of Grubby goodness.  I always thought LILO
  was  good  enough  for  me,  but  now  I'm  beginning   to
  understand why a beast like Grub2 can be nice to befriend.
  Anyway, to see all the devices and  their  partitions  you
  can use the command "ls".  There  I  found  the  device  I
  wanted   to   boot    from    (in    my    case    "hd1").

- To actually boot from it I used the following commands:

$ set root=(hd1)
$ chainloader +1
$ boot

- Bob's your aunt (I don't believe in gender conformity :-)


Hyperlinks:
[1]: http://liveusb-openbsd.sourceforge.net/


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                       Tags: english