The USB stick itself is booted just like a standard hard disk. So you
really want to try to make the memory stick look like a virtual HDD.
If you're hosted on Linux, or even have a Linux guest which you can plug
the USB HDD into, try this:
1. Use VirtualBox to create a fixed disk the exact same size as your
memory stick (use fdisk to determine the exact sector count of the
memory stick. You can go larger than the memory stick if you don't mind
wasting space.) It *must* be a fixed-size virtual disk.
2. Assuming your memory stick is /dev/sdi (you'll have to check the
output of 'mount' or use some other way to determine your memory stick
size.)
$ dd if=/dev/sdi of=flat_vdi_file seek=9 conv=notrunc
- I used a hex editor to find the start of the disk image in the vdi
file; different versions of VirtualBox might need a different seek. I'm
using 3.0.4.
- Replace "/dev/sdi" with the path to your device.
ISO images are CD-only (ISO refers to ISO9660, the old CD filesystem
standard, which sometimes shares space with the newer UDF.) And ISO
images have convoluted bootloading, something about El Torito and old
1.44 MB floppy disk images. I would avoid trying to make the memory
stick look like a CD...
If you're not on Linux I'm not sure what the quickest way to do this
would be. 'dd' is the ideal tool for the job, but I don't recall the
device names you need to use to access the raw disk image from Windows
(they exist, but I don't remember them and their namespace is difficult
to browse...)
This should be a scriptable task - does VirtualBox have any tools with
it that'll take a raw image and prefix it with whatever headers are
necessary to make VirtualBox use it as a fixed-size disk image?
Cheers,
Greg
I would recommend:
The USB image will not be an iso[9660 image].
Joep L. Blom wrote:
Robert Bronsdon wrote:
Hello,
I'm pretty sure it should be possible to turn the USB stick into an
ISO. If you can work out how to do this then you could just boot the
ISO.
On the negative side of this post I'm not sure how you would go about
doing this. A search for "imaging software" or something similar
should yield results though.
Robert,
There is a good example in the ubuntu archives.
Look here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
Joep
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