A day after I sidestep my way into a Crux installation to avoid USB CDROM issues, I find this brief set of notes reprinted to the Crux mailing list. If I understand it right, it’s a step-by-step conversion of the Crux ISO into a bootable USB, which I can only assume allows external sources for the installation process.

As a review and for my own notes, doing this on an Arch system basically required:

1. mkdir -p /mnt/{loop,usb}
2. yaourt -S dosfstools syslinux
3. fdisk /dev/sdb
1. o
2. n
3. p
4. 1
5. (enter)
6. (enter)
7. t
8. 0b
9. a
10. 1
11. w
4. dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb
5. /sbin/mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdb1
6. mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
7. mount -o loop,ro crux-2.6.iso /mnt/loop
8. rsync -aq /mnt/loop/ /mnt/usb/
9. umount /mnt/loop
10. mv /mnt/usb/boot/{iso,sys}linux
11. mv /mnt/usb/boot/syslinux/{iso,sys}linux.cfg
12. sed -i -e ‘s/isolinux/syslinux/g’ /mnt/usb/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg
13. wget -O /mnt/usb/crux.squashfs http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/crux/tmp/crux.squashfs
14. wget -O /mnt/usb/boot/initramfs http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/crux/tmp/initramfs
15. umount /mnt/usb
16. syslinux /dev/sdb1

In my case though, it wasn’t the magic bullet. I can boot the USB stick and the familiar Crux header spools past, but at the “module loading” step, both squashfs.ko and isofs.ko are spat back, with the message “device or resource busy” … and I get no farther than my previous attempts with the actual CD.

No harm done. I am learning slowly from these things. And it’s rather gratifying to build a USB stick that will boot. I shall have to experiment a little more and see if there are any other CD-based distros that I can convert to bootable USB. Some already have that — Arch for example has img files, which are wonderful — but some would be nice to change over.

But in the mean time, my scheme for installing Crux on the X60s remains the same. Now to put my evil plan to work. …