make a debian installation usb

February 14, 2009

To download the installer we do as follows

$ wget http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-amd64/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz

and we will also need the same iso file as when making an installation cd

$ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r2/amd64/iso-cd/debian-40r2-amd64-netinst.iso

The exact mountpoint of the usb can be found with

$ fdisk -l

Assuming your usb is mounted as /dev/sda we can extract the boot.img.gz to the usb stick.

$ zcat boot.img.gz &gt; /dev/sda

Then mount the usb.

# mount /dev/sda /mnt

when this is done simply copy the .iso to the same usb disk

# cp debian-40r2-amd64-netinst.iso /mnt

and then unmount the usb stick

# umount /mnt

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