Install from a USB flash drive
From ArchWiki
i18n |
---|
English |
Türkçe |
Español |
Contents |
The New and Improved Way, on GNU/Linux
Beginning from release 2008.06, USB images are provided. Download them from your local mirror (choose the .img files). To install, first ensure the USB device is unmounted and then issue the following command:
$ dd bs=8M if=image.img of=/dev/sd[x]
where image.img is the path to the img file and /dev/sd[x] is your USB device. *Make sure to use /dev/sdx and not /dev/sdx1. This is a very common error!
UNetBootin
Another way to make a USB drive bootable, is by using UNetBootin. This application can download most distributions for you and write it to your drive. Or you can provide your own images, which does not have to be a special USB image.
Using the Archlinux ISOLINUX image and Gujin boot loader
You can follow the instructions about Booting multiple LiveCD's from a single USB stick. In a nutshell, you create 2 partitions on your USB drive, copy the Gujin boot loader image to the first partition, and copy Arch's ISOLINUX image to the second.
The New and Improved Way, on Mac OS X
To be able to use dd on your usb device on a Mac you have to do some special maneuvers. First of all insert your usb device, OS X will automount it, and run
diskutil list
in Terminal.app. Figure out what your usb device is called - mine was called /dev/disk1. (Just use the 'mount' command.) Now you run
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
to unmount the partitions on the device (i.e., /dev/disk1s1) while keeping the device proper (i.e., /dev/disk1). Now we can continue in accordance with the Linux instructions above (but use bs=8192 if you're using the OS X dd, the number comes from 1024*8).
The New and Improved Way, on Windows
To write the USB image on Windows, you will need flashnul (English version of the page) or Cygwin.
Edit Working Link --Anonymo 10:03, 4 April 2009 (EDT)
The Flashnul Way
From a command prompt, invoke flashnul with -p, and determine which device index is your USB drive. For example, my output looks like this:
C:\>flashnul -p Avaible [sic] physical drives: 0 size = 200048565760 (186 Gb) 1 size = 400088457216 (372 Gb) 2 size = 400088457216 (372 Gb) 3 size = 4060086272 (3872 Mb)
In my case, with a 4 GB USB drive, it is device index 3.
When you have determined which device is the correct one, you can write the image to your drive, by invoking flashnul with the device index, -L, and the path to your image. In my case, it would be
C:\>flashnul 3 -L path/to/arch/usb.img
As long as you are really sure you want to write the data, type yes, then wait a bit for it to write. If you get an access denied error, unplugging and re-attaching the drive worked for me.
If under Vista or Win7, you should open the console as administrator, or else flashnul will fail to open the stick as a block device and will only be able to write via the drive handle windows provides
Note: I had to do "C:\flashnul\flashnul.exe H: -L c:\archlinux-2008.06-core-i686.img" for it to work. I kept getting access denied if i just used the number. -gejr
The Cygwin Way
Make sure your cygwin installation contains the dd package. Or if you don't want to install Cygwin, you can simply download dd for windows from http://www.chrysocome.net/dd.
Place your image file in your home directory, in my case it is:
C:\cygwin\home\John\
Run cygwin as administrator (required for cygwin to access hardware). To write to your USB drive use the following command:
dd if=image.img of=\\.\[x]:
where image.img is the path to the img file within the cygwin directory and \\.\[x]: is your USB device where x is the windows designated letter, in my case "\\.\d:".
Note: This will irrevocably delete all files on your USB stick, so make sure you don't have any important files on the stick before doing this.
win32 disk imager
Download win32 disk imager from http://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer. Run the program. Select the .img file and usb stick. Click on the write button. Now you should be able to boot from the usb stick and install Arch Linux from it.
UNetBootin
Another way to make a USB drive bootable, is by using UNetBootin. This application can download most linux distributions for you and write it to your drive. Or you can provide your own images, which does not have to be a special USB image.
Old Method from ISO, deprecated
- Prepare USB stick:
The arch-ftp.img is about 150 MB, so it should fit on a 256 MB USB stick. The arch-core.img is ~300 MB and should fit on a 512 MB stick.
1. Partition the USB stick. Create one partition with FAT16 type, make it bootable. Remember its name, such as /dev/sd[x]1.
cfdisk /dev/sd[x]
2. Make a FAT16 filesystem (you need dosfstools)
mkdosfs /dev/sd[x]1
3. Get the arch-base install ISO from www.archlinux.org
4. Mount the iso to an temporary directory
mkdir -p /mnt/archcd mount -o loop /Path/to/iso /mnt/archcd
5. Mount the USB Stick
mkdir -p /mnt/usb/ mount /dev/sd[x]1 /mnt/usb/
6. Copy the .iso to the USB Stick
cp -ra /mnt/archcd/* /mnt/usb/
7. Copy the boot data
cd /mnt/usb/isolinux/ cp vmlinuz /mnt/usb/ cp initrd.img /mnt/usb/ cp boot.* /mnt/usb/ cp isolinux.cfg /mnt/usb/syslinux.cfg
8. Install MBR and syslinux(1)
lilo -M /dev/sd[x] mbr syslinux -s /dev/sd[x]1
After booting from the USB stick:
Start the installation by logging in as root and invoke the command "/arch/setup".
The installer should mount the source media automatically. If it fails you can manually mount the source media on the stick to the /src directory with the following command:
mount /dev/sd[x] /src
Notes and Troubleshooting:
(1) Using lilo is not really needed because syslinux does the "floppy" loading stuff. But if you get some error like "Can't load operating system" you have to perform the lilo command.
(2) If you get "Cluster sizes larger than 16K not supported" error when booting this means you need to install more recent version of syslinux.
(3) Space not used on the USB stick can still be used for storing files... Use a utility like gparted and add a partition to the unused space.