Include:Copying Alpine to Flash

The following part describes how to manually create a custom (writable) USB boot device with Alpine Linux.

Copy ISO content to USB stick as individual files

Warning: We assume here sda is your USB stick which would hold bootable Alpine Linux files.

The following procedure is for Alpine Linux distribution itself, if you are using other Linux distro or other operating system you should know the best how to install syslinux and where mbr.bin file is located on your filesystem.

1. If you created a new partition above, format the flash medium with a FAT32 filesystem (replacing sda with your flash medium name):

   apk add dosfstools
   mkdosfs -F32 /dev/sda1

2. Install syslinux and MBR (replacing sda with your flash medium name):

   apk add syslinux
   dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda
   syslinux /dev/sda1

3. Copy the files to the flash medium (replacing sda with your flash medium name):

   mkdir -p /media/sda1 mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 cd /media/cdrom cp -a .alpine-release * /media/sda1/ umount /media/sda1

4. (Optional) Remove any apkovl files that were transfered as part of the copy process. This should be done if you wish to have a fresh install. Replace sda with your flash medium name)

   mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 rm /media/sda1/*.apkovl.tar.gz umount /media/sda1

Troubleshooting

Wrong Device Name

If you cannot boot from the flash medium and you see something like:

Mounting boot media failed.
initramfs emergency recovery shell launched. Type 'exit' to continue boot

then it is likely that the device name in syslinux.cfg is wrong. You should replace the device name in this line:

append initrd=/boot/grsec.gz alpine_dev=usbdisk:vfat modules=loop,cramfs,sd-mod,usb-storage quiet

with the proper device name.

• For boot from USB, the device name should be 'usbdisk' (as shown above)
• For other options, you can run cat /proc/partitions to see the available disks (i.e. 'sda' or 'sdb')

Non-FAT32 Filesystems

When your flash medium is formatted with a filesystem other than FAT32, you might have to specify the necessary filesystem modules in the boot parameters.

To do so, mount the flash medium and change the syslinux.cfg file line from

append initrd=/boot/grsec.gz alpine_dev=usbdisk:vfat modules=loop,cramfs,sd-mod,usb-storage quiet

to

append initrd=/boot/grsec.gz alpine_dev=usbdisk:ext3 modules=loop,cramfs,sd-mod,usb-storage,ext3 quiet

in the case of an ext3 formatted partition. A similar procedure might apply to other filesystems (if they are supported by syslinux and the Alpine Linux kernel).