#824 Please update the installation manual for USB Stick

[Luca Arzeni]

A recurrent question is how to write a ipcop image into a bootable usbstick.
The IpCop manual section is empty, and googling around I found few hints but no one working.

I've tested the fdd image and the hdd image, but there was no way to make an USB bootable stick from them with different error (missing isolinux is the most frequently error found).

At the end, thanks to Debian, I've found a clean and nice way to create an USB-writeable image.

To do this, you need a tool, isohybrid that comes with syslinux package; so:

# apt-get install syslinux
# isohybrid path/to/ipcop/image.iso (use the cdrom iso image, at the time of this writing is "ipcop-2.1.8-install-cd.i486.iso")

After you have converted the original ipcop cdrom image to isohybrid format (warning: the original file will be overwritten), you can use dd to write it into your usb stick.

Use lsblk to identify the device path (e.g., /dev/sdX) of your USB drive:

# lsblk
sde                                     8:64   1   7.4G  0 disk 
└─sde1                                  8:65   1   7.4G  0 part  /media/usbdrive

If it's been automounted, as is the case above, unmount it first:

# umount /media/usbdrive

Use dd to write the ISO image to the disk path. That's /dev/sde NOT /dev/sde1:

dd if=path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sde

Note: IMHO ipcop could release its own images in isohybrid format, so simplifying the admins job...

Thanks,
larzeni