> I'd like to make a live wheezy USB dongle. I followed the instructions on
Why wheezy ... it's old. I have been running wheezy for about 5 years without any problem. The machine has two partitions / and /aux. I attempted a fresh install of jessie in /. But the install failed and the machine won't boot. It appears that the kernel in jessie tickles something in the hardware that wasn't tickled by wheezy. I will likely upgrade the firmware. (Dell Poweredge machines have a lot of distinct firmware components besides the BIOS.) But before I do, I want to get the data off the /aux partition. So I want to boot something that I know works. > https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb > > to make a live USB from > > http://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/7.11.0-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-7.11.0-amd64-standard.iso There are many ways to make a bootable HDD image if this can be booted. By using aufs or newer overlayfs, you can choose to make OS persistent while your running system writing on RAM(tmpfs). https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/InstallOnSDcardOrUsbStick I have not tested but this may give you hint. I also use kvm to install system on USB connected HDD from my working Debian system. many ways ... I don't need it to be persistent. I just need to get enough of a root shell to run tar|ssh to get the data off of /aux. /aux is /dev/md1 which is RAID5 across /dev/sd[a-f]2. So I need enough to be able to mount that read-only. Then when that is done I will upgrade the firmware and reattempt a jessie install. So I'd appreciate help getting the easiest way to get a root shell with tar, ssh, and mdadm. The issue is that the machine is too old to boot isohybrid from USB. It needs to boot msdos from fat32 on USB. See other emails in this thread. Jeff (http://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi)
