Making the USB Thumbdrive Bootable

In my previous post, I mentioned that I sometimes have trouble using the mksusebootdisk script make the thumb drive bootable. In a recent endeavour to install openSUSE 10.3 onto the Eee PC again, I encountered the same problem. This time though, I was in a rush for time and simply refused to do the whole process from formatting the file system (till this date I still have not figured out what is the cause of the problem).

So I turned to Google. Lo and behold, by chance I bumped into John Anderson's blog. In this particular page he described the manual steps that can be taken to make the thumb drive bootable. And it works!

All that needs to be done are but just a few steps. First step is to simply copy ALL the files under <installation_dvd>/boot/i386/loader/ to the root directory of the thumb drive.

Then rename the file isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg in the thumb drive.

Finally unmount the thumb drive and run the command below (the syslinux package has to be installed), assuming that the thumb drive device name is /dev/sdb:

syslinux /dev/sdb1

And you're done!