Well I spent the better part of a day trying to install Gutsy Alternate via USB. The Gutsy live cd works fine but it seems there is the ‘Where is the cdrom?’ problem when using Gutsy Alternate. I have finally succeeded in getting it to work correctly so I thought I would share the steps I used.

## Requirements ##

• A working machine with Gutsy
• A copy of the Gutsy Alt iso

## Paths - Yours may differ, change accordingly

• Usb stick mounted to /media/usbstick
• Usb stick device is /dev/sdb

mkdir -p /media/usbstick/boot/grub
cp /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/* /media/usbstick/boot/grub/
echo '(hd0) /dev/sdb' > /media/usbstick/boot/grub/device.map
grub-install --root-directory=/media/usbstick /dev/sdb

# Create this file using vi or gedit

/media/usbstick/boot/grub/menu.lst

# Add to menu.lst:

title Ubuntu Hard Drive Installation
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz boot=install root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=1048576 rw
initrd /initrd.gz

wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/ \
installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/initrd.gz
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/ \
installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/vmlinuz

cp initrd.gz /media/usbstick/
cp vmlinuz /media/usbstick/
cp ubuntu-7.10-alternate-i386.iso /media/usbstick/

Unmount your usb stick
Boot other machine from usb stick and install Ubuntu.

Hope that works for you.

*I know the whole grub procedure could be simplified with syslinux but I just couldn’t make it work.