Problems with 11.2 install on a flash drive...?

I have attempted to install 11.2 on a 4Gb flash drive as described here:

How to Install SUSE to a USB Flash Drive | USB Pen Drive Linux

The first problem I came to was that I don’t get an “Always do this for this type of media” check box, the next issue I run into is I don’t get the “properties” option when I right click on the drive from the “My computer” location so I can’t un-check “mount automatically”. I tried to instal the software without following these steps and it is not becoming bootable. The bios is set up to boot from a removable device and it sees the flash drive. I have set the bios to treat it like a hard drive (its an option there). When I boot the computer I see “invalid system disk” which leads me to think there is no MBR on the flash drive? I could really use some help…

I noticed there was an option durring instalation to write grub to the MBR - or something to this effect. I have tried the instalation with this option enabled and disabled.

What are you actually trying to achieve? If you just want to install SUSE via USB, try this…

Live USB stick - openSUSE

If you need the system actually on the USB, this might work (haven’t tried it myself though)…

http://lizards.opensuse.org/2009/11/12/opensuse-11-2-persistent-liveusb-setup/

I want to use the USB drive as if it were a SSD. Anyone…?

Ok, so isn’t that what the second link does?

There’s someone in the comments describing an install to USB from DVD, and they seem to think it amounts to the same thing.

Perhaps this contains some useful information - it’s old, and relates to SDHC card installs, but maybe you can adapt it…

EeeUser Forum / openSUSE onto SDHC without CD drive -> STUCK!

It appears I have a flash drive that does not permit being made bootable at all. Is this possible? How can I find out what drives are able to be bootable? I would very much like to just run the live CD and install the OS normally to this flash drive - is this possible?

Yes - not all flash drives are bootable, and not all BIOSes boot flash drives.

Most modern hardware should work.

Personally, I’d try the DD technique described in the first link of my first post first - it is in a certain sense the simplest of all, and it’s certainly the most standard.

For search reasons and future users that may have a similar problem PNY has e-mailed me to say that none of their drive can be made bootable. My bios supports booting to the flash drive. Is there any way of telling if a drive can be made bootable in advance?

Tricky - my only advice would be to search for the brand name on any netbook forums you can think of. Eee user, as linked before, is a good example.

EeeUser Forum

If they’re popular, and they don’t boot, someone will have found out…

AFAIK some drives can be fixed to make them bootable by erasing them entirely with ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[letter][number]’. Worked on mine.

Well, my PNY flash drives boot just fine, and I’ve used them to install just about every mainstream Linux distro at one point or another. Indeed, I’ve found them particularly simple and reliable.

You certainly need to clear superfluous pre-installed software out of some Toshiba drives (U3 “smart” is the usual name) before they can be guaranteed to boot properly.

As with “dd” for making a Live USB, the command line process for clearing pre-installed software from USB sticks will probably be be the simplest and safest in the long run. However, there is a small software package that runs under Windows, provides a GUI, and does the same job (Google will be your friend if you want to try that for any reason).

It is called Unetbootin, and is worth a try.
First though I would work on making sure your drive is bootable in the first place.
Perhaps just with memtest or an old DOS or something.

I tried installing suse on me eee pc 901. The issue is tring to use different partitions on “/”. please read my post at

Installing in Asus EEE PC 20G - openSUSE Forums

If someone has a solution it would be great

Making a drive bootable with memtest? Sure?
And why an old DOS, when we have all the tools on board. Even DOS if we want. And better than the real DOS ever was.