I like Mageia and I love to use it and make it known to people. Sometimes we have special requirements and for me it was to be able to boot both 32- and 64-bit Mageia from EXT4 partitions on a pen-drive.
It is not as easy and obvious as it might seem but it is not difficult either, so here is the way I did it:
First of all I modified the live initrd.gz so that my live Mageia boots from an EXT4 partition. If you are interested; you may download these initramfs from my personal web-site at:
This is outdated
http://mtailounie.net/progs/liveinit32 - (for 32-bit)
http://mtailounie.net/progs/liveinit64 - (for 64-bit)
Use the following link instead:
http://mtailounie.net/progs/mageialive.html (both 32 and 64 bit versions)
Step I:
Now I have a 16GB pen-drive. I decided to have the following partitioning scheme:
11GB NTFS-3G PRIMARY Partition Labelled USB_DATA - For use in both Windows and Linux
2GB EXT4 PRIMARY Partition Labelled MGA3X64 - For 64-bit Live Mageia
2GB EXT4 PRIMARY Partition Labelled MGA3X32 - For 32-bit Live Mageia
1GB SWAP PRIMARY Partition Labelled USB_SWAP - For live system swap
Step II:
I, then, downloaded the ISO's for the Mageia 3 Live KDE DVD's (32 and 64 bit versions)
Step III:
as root;
I mounted my MGA3X64, MGA3X32, 32-bit live ISO and 64-bit live ISO. - (Choose the mount points at your will)
Step IV:
I copied the contents of each ISO on the relative partition. (32-bit content onto MGA3X32 and 64-bit one onto MGA3X64)
Step V:
I copied the modified initramfs into the /boot folder on my USB partitions - (mga3init32 into MGA3X32/boot and mga3init64 into MGA3X64/boot)
Step VI:
I installed GRUB from my Mageia system onto my USB disk as follows:
- Code: Select all
# grub-install --root-directory=/media/MGA3X64 /dev/sdf
Please note that your mount point might be different and most probably the identification of your pen-drive as well. My mount-point above is /media/MGA3X64 and my pen-drive is /dev/sdf.
Step VII:
I created my /media/MGA3X64/boot/grub/menu.lst as follows:
- Code: Select all
timeout 27
color black/cyan yellow/cyan
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/boot/gfxmenu
default 0
title Mageia 3 Live 64-Bit
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=mgalive:LABEL=MGA3X64 splash quiet rd.luks=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 vga=788
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/mga3init64
title Mageia 3 Live 32-Bit
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=mgalive:LABEL=MGA3X32 splash quiet rd.luks=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 vga=788
initrd (hd0,2)/boot/mga3init32
PS. You might need to copy the gfxmenu from your installation into MGA3X64/boot/gfxmenu
Now I can boot my beloved Mageia USB. Please note that for my needs the Live EXT4 partitions are mounted rw..sorry folks.
Hope this be of use to others.