Installing openSuSE leap 42.2 and running Knoppix 7.7 from an USB

This is a personal short history about rescuing "old" laptops. And starts in the family... kids grow and they need new machines. Fortunately, my kids are the kind of very careful ones. This implies that any kind of hardware that is on their hands gets old, but get almost any damage. The last piece of good hardware I've recovered is a hp pavilion g6 series, from 2009. It is a nice piece of hardware, but with a now very limited computing power.

The first step was to try to run a Knoppix distribution from a DVD, just to realize that we run out of discs at home, and that this won't be a deal. So a bit of search around bring me to this blog entry that details how to dump an ISO image to an USB memory stick, and boot from it. It is a fantastic one, because the process was a bit different in my laptop, running opensusE leap 42.1, but the results are almost the same.

Unfortunately I've forgot to take notes on the commands and results from the process. Anyway, the result was amazing. Now I have an USB stick that boots a Knoopix 7.7.1 x86_64 in less than a minute.

The next step was to recover the Windows 7 install into the laptop (you never know who will end up using it), defragment  the disk so all occupied sectors are at the beginning, and then install the openSuSE leap 42.2. But again got stuck into the problem of having no empty DVD disks around. So I've decided to give a try to the same procedure for the opensuse leap 42.2 x86_64 net installation image. And this time I've took notes of the commands and results from the command line. It is true that the opensuse install page gives lots of options, but none as fast as this one.

Assuming that your USB is on /dev/sdb, and that the iso image is already downloaded, then as root we check that the USB stick has enough capacity, then the ISO image is modified to be bootable, and dumped into the USB.  Then we check that the format is OK, and we can use it to install the distribution to the laptop.

earth:/dev # fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 3.8 GiB, 4026531840 bytes, 7864320 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1          32 7864319 7864288  3.8G  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

earth:/dev # fdisk -l /dev/sdb1

Disk /dev/sdb1: 3.8 GiB, 4026515456 bytes, 7864288 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

earth:/dev # isohybrid -o 1 -h 64 -s 32 -e 1 /home/user/downloads/openSUSE-Leap-42.2-NET-x86_64.iso 
earth:/dev # cat /home/user/downloads/openSUSE-Leap-42.2-NET-x86_64.iso > /dev/sdb
earth:/dev # fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 3.8 GiB, 4026531840 bytes, 7864320 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x5d2e2084

Device     Boot Start    End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1  *        1 194559  194559  95M 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS

In my case, the USB stick was underused, as the size is 3.8 GiB, and the install boot image is only 96 MiB. But it does it's job. So many thanks to Daniel Leidert for his blog, to Klaus Knopper for his great distribution on a DVD, and to all the people at opensuse for making a great distro.

If some is curious about my linux ties, I've been running (open)SuSE since version 5.6, in 1996. I've also worked with Solaris long time ago.

All the best!