WARNING: these instructions will ERASE the contents of your USB key.

WARNING: incorrect use of these instructions could lead to your hard drive being erased.

-- no liability can be accepted for any usage of instructions listed on this page - use at your own risk!

-- if in doubt, consider purchasing a pre-made key. (email keys@encryptec.net for more details)

Flash Linux can be downloaded from the following location: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=124770
To verify the download, from the folder with the file and it's .md5 file in it, type:

md5sum -c flashlinux-0.3.2.bz2.md5

# the desired response is;

flashlinux-0.3.2.bz2: OK

• Insert your key into a USB port on your computer.
• Use "fdisk -l" to see what devices / partitions are available on your computer. Typically the key will show up as device "sda" if you have a standard workstation, or possibly device "sdb" or "sdc" if you have one or more SCSI controllers in your system.

## note that in this example we're using an 8Mb USB key.

#fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1          25      200781   83  Linux
/dev/sda2              26         269     1959930   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda3             270        3917    29302560   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order
Disk /dev/sdb: 7 MB, 7979008 bytes
1 heads, 16 sectors/track, 974 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16 * 512 = 8192 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1         974        7791+  83  Linux

Once you have identified your USB key (/dev/sdb in this case), you should probably erase the partition table, just to make sure it's "clean". Be very careful when doing this as it's going to completely wipe the device in question. If you accidentally use the device name referring to your hard drive, it will WIPE YOUR HARD DRIVE. There is NO RECOVERY.
Normally a PC workstation with IDE drives will have a device name of /dev/hda, however SATA (serial ATA) systems or SCSI systems will have a device name of /dev/sda. Read the output of fdisk -l and check the output (disk size is a good indication!) with a high degree of paranoia.

To erase your device;

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1k count=1000

You can then re-partition the device with the following command;

sfdisk --force /dev/sdb

Just press return to all the questions and you should be left with one Linux partition occupying the entire USB key. Next you NEED to make the partition active in order for your computer's BIOS to boot from it. Execute the following commands;

#sfdisk -A1 /dev/sdb
Done
#fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdb: 7 MB, 7979008 bytes
1 heads, 16 sectors/track, 974 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16 * 512 = 8192 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1         974        7791+  83  Linux

Note that the "*" indicates that the partition is active.

## Do not enter the '#' symbols
## [device] is your USB key device, normally sda1
## [device root] is the device root, normally sda (take the '1' off the end)
## [version] is the version of the softwarem, initially 0.3
## Note that you must have "GRUB" installed to be able to do this

#mkfs -text2 -m 0 /dev/[device]
#mkdir -p /mnt/usbkey
#mount /dev/[device] /mnt/usbkey
#tar xvfj flashlinux-[version].bz2 -C /mnt/usbkey
#grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt/usbkey /dev/[device root]
#umount /dev/[device]
#e2label /dev/[device] FlashLinux

You should now have a bootable copy of Flash Linux installed on your USB key.

Note that in order for a PC to be able to boot from a USB key;

• The PC must support this feature, typically if the PC is less than 2-3 years old, it will support this.
• You must enable "USB-HDD" (or equivalent) as a boot device in the BIOS. The BIOS will maintain a list of devices from which to boot and will scan each device in turn when powered up. Typically these will be floppy, cdrom, hard disk. You mush make sure that the USB (or USB-HDD) option appears before any other media that will take priority (the hard disk for example).

Note for FEDORA 3 users:

It has been reported that FEDORA are using a customised version of the ext2 filesystem which is incompatible with other Linux distros including FlashLinux. We have a number of possible solutions;

• Install from a Linux machine running something other than FEDORA (try; Debian, Mandrake, Suse etc)
• Download a Gentoo Live CD and install using this
• Use an ext3 filesystem, which should work as of FlashLinux 0.3.2 (although it will consume more USB key space and we've not tried it)