Unable to boot Live Fedora on a USB flash drive

[Stewart Williams]

Stewart Williams wrote:
> I am trying to create a LiveUSB drive using a 2GB USB flash drive, but
> I'm being unsuccessful for some reason.
> 
> Ideally I was hoping to create one based on Omega-10, but I get the same
> problems with Fedora.
> 
> Here's what I have tried:
> 
> 1. Creating a LiveCD from omega-10-desktop.iso and boot it (which works
> fine).
> Plug in USB stick, fdisk it as one partition, type 6 (fat 16) then
> format it by running 'mkfs.msdos -F 16 -n usbdisk /dev/sdg1'
> As root running 'livecd-iso-to-disk /dev/live /dev/sdg1'
> Seems to complete without error
> 
> 2. Boot Fedora 9 install on my desktop and prepare the USB stick as above
> Run liveusb-creator GUI and select /dev/sdg1 as target, and
> omega-10-desktop.iso as source (Also tried F10-Live-i686.iso as source)
> Completes without error
> 
> However when I try and boot of the stick either by physically booting
> using the BIOS or testing with QEMU I get the following errors:
> 
> Running 'qemu -hda /dev/sdg -m 256 -std-vga' or booting using a physical
> PC I get a garbled prompt
> 
> http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?07644a5805.png
> 
> Running 'qemu -hda /dev/sdg1 -m 256 -std-vga' I get an error stating
> that it can find the root filesystem
> 
> http://www.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?159f02408f.png
> 
> Does anyone know what I may be doing wrong?
> 
> Many Thanks.
> 
> 

Solved!

Even though I got no errors, I tried this command from the LiveUSB howto:

$ cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdg

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo#SYSLINUX_Boot_Error.21

I still got the error about the root fs not being found, so I used
liveusb-creator to transfer the image again and to my amazement it worked!

It boots and loads the desktop as expected. Yay!