The following sequence of helper commands will create a basic USB/HDD image containing just the Debian standard system without X.org. It is suitable for booting from USB sticks, USB hard drives, and various other portable storage devices.
Note if you created an iso image with the previous example, you will
need to clean up your working directory with the
lh clean helper command (see
Section 4.1.3, “The lh clean helper”):
$ lh clean --binary
Run the lh config helper command with the
parameters to configure the "config/" hierarchy to
create a USB/HDD image type:
$ lh config -b usb-hdd
Now build the image with the lh build helper
command:
# lh build
The generated binary image contains a VFAT partition
and the syslinux bootloader, ready to be directly
written on an USB stick. Plug in an USB stick with a size larger than
that of binary.img and type:
$ dd if=binary.img of=${USBSTICK}
where ${USBSTICK} is the device file of your
key, like /dev/sdb (not a partition like
/dev/sdb1!); you can find the right device name by
looking in dmesg's output after plugging in the
stick, for example.
If you want to use the remaining free space after you have installed the
binary.img, you can use a partitioning tool such as
gparted or parted to create a new partition on the stick. The first
partition will be used by the Debian Live system.
# gparted ${USBSTICK}
After the creation of the partition you have to create a filsystem on it. One possible choice would be ext2 (ext3 isn't recommended because the journaling causes too many writes to the stick).
# mkfs.ext2 ${USBSTICK}
If you want to use this data partition with Windows, use FAT32.
# mkfs.vfat -F 32
FIXME: Describe installing Debian Live to a partition (e.g. /dev/sdc1) AND using a bootloader to boot this.