As I’m planning to set up a fresh new gentoo on my new Atom 330 system, I was looking for a suitable boot medium today. The Atom board only has SATA connectors and I don’t have a SATA CD-ROM, so I had to look for an USB bootable 64bit linux. This should not be a problem nowadays … I thought.

Well, first attempt: Ubuntu 9.10 64bit desktop. Downloaded the ISO and then looked for some tutorial. It turned out they now have a debian/ubuntu/windows custom usb-creator tool which is not available on gentoo. So I tried unetbootin, which promised to create bootable USB sticks from all kinds of distributions. It failed. For some reason the BIOS said the resulting stick was not bootable. My next try was to follow some generic tutorials for converting bootable CD images into bootable USB sticks. With this attempt I got the Ubuntu image to boot into the initramfs but it then didn’t find the live image to mount and I didn’t really care to hack into the initramfs. Frustrating. This should be easy, instead.

Well, then I took a look at GRML, as it is said to be a nice litle Linux distro for admins. And surprisingly all it takes to make a GRML ISO boot from USB Stick is dumping the ISO on the stick with dd. dd if=grml64-medium.iso of=/dev/sdX. Done. Works nicely. Thank you GRML!