bootable-gparted-usb-stick

Creating a bootable usb stick with the Gparted live iso in Ubuntu. Gparted is a graphical partition editor which can resize, move, copy, create, delete your hard drive partitions.

Overview:

  • Format your usb stick to Fat16 and make it bootable using gparted.
  • Install the gparted-live*.iso using unetbootin. (unetbootin also automatically installs the syslinux bootloader)
  • Reinstall syslinux onto usb stick. (Gparted’s live cd requires syslinux newer than ver 3.71. Currently (May 7 2009) Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty has syslinux 3.63. Use apt-cache show syslinux | grep "^Filename" to check Ubuntu’s version)

Installation Steps

1. Install gparted and unetbootin

sudo aptitude install gparted unetbootin

2. Download the gparted live iso and the latest syslinux.

wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gparted/gparted-live-0.4.4-1.iso
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/syslinux-3.80.tar.bz2

3. Insert your usb stick into the computer, and copy any files you want to save to your hard drive. You will be reformatting your stick and will lose all the files on the usb drive.

4. Run gparted.

sudo gparted

Select your usb drive. (Probably something like /dev/sdc). Right click on the partition and select Unmount to unmount the drive. Format the drive to Fat16 and apply. Then make the usb drive bootable by going to Manage Flags and selecting the boot flag.

screenshot-gparted

Exit gparted.

5. Remount your usb drive by unplugging and replugging your usb stick.

6. Run unetbootin

unetbootin

Select Diskimage ISO and locate the gparted-*.iso that you downloaded. Make sure the correct partition is selected at the bottom and click OK.

screenshot-unetbootin

Don’t reboot yet. Just exit unetbootin.

7. Now, you would be done, except that Ubuntu’s syslinux is version 3.63 and the gparted live iso requires at least syslinux version 3.71, so you need to reinstall syslinux onto your usb stick.

Unpack the syslinux tarball you downloaded.

tar xjvf syslinux-3.80.tar.bz2

Now install syslinux onto your usb stick

cd syslinux-3.80/linux
sudo ./syslinux -s /dev/sdc1

8. Now you’re done. Reboot using your new gparted bootable usb stick.

End Notes:

This method should work on other bootable isos too.

You could try to use Fat32 if your motherboard supports booting from Fat32 USB devices. Fat16 is generally more compatible though.

If your USB stick is bigger than the the allowable Fat16 size (2gb), make two partitions: first a 1-2gb Fat16 partition for your boot drive, and a second Fat32 partition with the rest of the space.