Installing openSuSE from pendrive

Question

Back then I found so many good howtos about this but now, I can't find any of them. Even the ones pointing to the openSuSE wiki have been deleted. One wild guess is Unetbootin, but I doubt it'd work. (Usually it never works as it should.)

Answer 1

As of Dec 2012 (openSUSE 12.2), all the other answers to this question are wrong.

To create a bootable openSUSE USB drive, you must use openSUSE Image Writer. There are versions for Windows and Linux.

I've just successfully booted openSUSE 12.2 from a USB stick. The boot option to check the integrity of the medium froze, but the live OS works fine.

Answer 2

Install SUSE to a USB Flash Drive using the CD

This tutorial covers the process of creating a SUSE Linux USB Flash Drive using the OpenSUSE Live CD. This tutorial works much like the install to an External USB Hard drive with the exception that the user is performing a full OpenSUSE install to a USB flash drive. The process does differ slightly! This tutorial was made possible due to a custom Portable SUSE script created and provided by James Rhodes. Please note that due to the limited number of write functions a flash drive can handle before going bad, you may reduce the life of your flash drive by performing this installation.

Answer 3

http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-help-here/install-boot-login/443077-installing-pendrive.html

I'll update this answer when we get an answer/solution. Thanks for all the tips though, sad thing they didn't work. :/

Answer 4

There is no official or easy way of doing this sadly. The live image can be copied, but you are doomed if you want to use the DVD.

Answer 5

Have you tried UNetBootin? I really like it, and it's worked well for me in the past. If it doesn't work, you could try Fedora's LiveUSB-Creator. And I'm guessing that, if you could boot successfully from the flash drive, there'd be no problems using the built-in installer. Finally, it may be possible to copy the contents of the *.iso directly to the flash drive via dd like this:

dd if=/path/to/opensuse.iso of=/dev/sda1

where "/dev/sda1" is the flash drive's device name. Please also note that the flash drive must be unmounted (but not ejected) for this last option to work. To be honest, though, I'm not sure how stable this last method is, so I'd really recommend UNetBootin or the LiveUSB-Creator. Good luck!