After some reading and searcing around, I have now made 3 different Linux installations on 3 different USB sticks to see what can be used. These 3 distributions are: Slax, Floppyfw and Damnsmalllinux.
I had hoped that there should be one common and typical way to set up the booting and communication to the memory stick, but one can hardley say that, they are a bit different.
Possible the Damnsmalllinux installation has a "framework" that can be used for a sme installation USB stick.
Basically you will need 3 basic prinsipples I believe:
1. The USB stick must be recognised as a fat (not fat32) system disk.
2. You must run the Linux installation boot image.
3. You must be able to mount and read the file structure on the installation USB stick.
One idea: Could it be possible to just use an existing and working Damsmalllinux on a USB stick installation, and then just write this over and replacing the files with sme installation files ??
There is a boot kernel at the sme installation cd
\dosutils\autoboot\vmlinuz
Could it work to write over the damnsmalllinux kernel with the sme installation kernel ?
The damnsmalllinux installation using existing images were the mort easy one.
For the floppyfw installation I used a more "make it all from the bottom approach". I wrote down these notes:
MINI, MINI HOWTO:
1. Format the USB stick using fat file system. (Not fat 32 !)
2. Use the program syslinux.exe, run command syslinux.exe -m e: (Where e: is the drive letter for the USB stick.)
http://syslinux.zytor.com/3. Download the newest flash tar.bz2 from this link:
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/download/Development/4. Extract the compressed file and copy the files over to the USB stick.
5. check if the config file is still missing om the flash image. If this is the case, copy it over from an earlier version. (Note the installation can not run or boot without a config file.)
6. Reboot your PC, set the Bios to boot from USB HD.
7. You are up and running with a floppyfw from the USB stick !
Problem: I have used really a lot of workhours to do the 3 USB installations and I am a bit "out of time" with some other projects.
Do you have time/interesst to make to make som further testing/development of these ideas or other ideas arond this an leave the results here ?
I will try to come back an proceed on after a little while.
Arne