Jelle Hermsen

I wanted to check out LiveUSB-OpenBSD, because I’m pondering about switching to OpenBSD for my daily desktop. However, my stubborn laptop acted up again and refused to boot from the USB drive I carefully put OpenBSD on. So I decided to take a trip down search engine lane and see what different ways there are to boot from a usb. It appears you can easily boot from a USB drive with Grub2 and here’s how to:

• Boot into Grub and press c to get into the command line
• If you’re running Trisquel GNU/Linux like I am, you’ll be confronted with a user/password question you probably haven’t seen before. Don’t panic, you are (probably) not an amnesiac. Trisquel automatically generates a password for you when you install this sweet flower of the GNU/Linux garden. You can find it in /etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD. If you want to get rid of it you can comment everything in that file and run sudo update-grub. But since I like this whole secure by default thing – which is one of the reasons I want to check out OpenBSD – I decided to just use the login name and password mentioned in the file.
• When you’re logged in you’ll see a shell which you can use to do all kinds of Grubby goodness. I always thought LILO was good enough for me, but now I’m beginning to understand why a beast like Grub2 can be nice to befriend. Anyway, to see all the devices and their partitions you can use the command “ls“. There I found the device I wanted to boot from (in my case “hd1”).
• To actually boot from it I used the following commands:
  set root=(hd1)
chainloader +1
boot
• Bob’s your aunt (I don’t believe in gender conformity :- )