Booting from USB with Grub2

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