Fun with USB sticks - how to make one bootable with OpenSolaris 2008.05

By David Stewart (Intel) (82 posts) on May 15, 2008 at 3:00 pm

One of the nice things about OpenSolaris 2008.05 is that it is delivered as a bootable LiveCD. This means that you can try out the OS easily on your computer and see if it will work without risking the OS you are running on it now. Once you decide that all of the features and drivers work, it's a relatively easy task to do a complete install on your hard disk.

Since it's about 700MB, you can use a relatively cheap - almost free - 1GB USB stick or thumb drive to show somebody how wonderful OpenSolaris is.

I happened to come by a couple of USB sticks and decided to load up 2008.05 on them so they could be carried to a variety of machines and check out how 2008.05 works on them.

I had a little fun trying various tips from the web. Ashok sent me a link to James Liu's blog, and I tried this procedure. It seems to work, and I liked it because it unpacks the steps and let me see what is going on under the covers. One caveat with James' procedure: one of the steps that copies files onto the stick throws a few errors[1].

For a more automated method, try out this one from Dave Miner:

This works like a champ, though to be clear, there is one correction (which I found by reading the scripts):

# ./usbgen <path_to_iso_file> <path_to_usb_image> `pwd` <tmpdir>

This one seems to have gotten messed up in the HTML, or the usbgen script has changed. There are only 3 arguments to usbgen now. I would recommend specifying absolute pathnames for all three arguments, which you can do by prefacing the file names with the `pwd` method.

# ./usbcopy <path_to_usb_image>

Again, an absolute pathname works best here.

Anyway, this method seems to work well, and has very few manual steps. In fact, once you do the "usbgen" step, you can use usbcopy to create multiple sticks from that image. Nice!

The downside with this method is that you need to have the Mercurial tools installed (to do the "hg" command). Fortunately, I had a machine sitting around with all of this infrastructure set up and working.  I suppose the other downside is that you need to run this from a Solaris or OpenSolaris machine, rather than from Windows.

Thanks Dave and James for writing this down. (And, since one of these USB sticks is going to my boss, I know he appreciates it too.)

[1] In the James Liu method, almost at the end, you run the following command:
# cp -rP@ .??* * /mnt/usbdrive

I got the following errors thrown from the cp command:

bin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
boot/solaris/bin/root_archive: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia0: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia1: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia2: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia3: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia4: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia5: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia6: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidia7: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/nvidiactl: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/stderr: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/stdin: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory
dev/stdout: failed to get acl entries: No such file or directory

I'm not sure if these are fatal or not.

Categories: Open Source

Comments (1) Comments RSS Feed

By Dave Miner on May 15th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Yes, usbgen changed since I wrote the original entry so it doesn't require as many arguments. Glad you got it worked out, anyway!


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