Fedora Live USB with GRUB

As already mentioned in my last post, my laptop won’t boot from a USB stick prepared using a binary copy of an ISO (by means of dd). Here is the method I use to boot the Fedora Live images off my USB stick using GNU GRUB2. The device node of the USB driver is denoted /dev/sdX in the following and must be replaced with the actual device node (e.g. /dev/sdc).

1. Prepare a partition on the USB stick and/or make sure there is enough space on it (it must be slightly larger than the ISO image).
2. Make sure it is flagged bootable. ( fdisk -l /dev/sdX is your friend)
3. Remember the name of the USB partition you’re going to use or if unlabelled, label it.
4. Loop-mount the ISO image using something like mount -o loop /path/to/iso /mnt/loop
5. Copy the content of the ISO over to the USB
6. Install GRUB on the USB by issuing grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt/usb /dev/sdX
7. Create a /mnt/usb/boot/grub/grub.cfg with the following content

   menuentry "Fedora Live" {
    linux /isolinux/vmlinuz0 root=live:LABEL=XYZ rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet  rhgb rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM
    initrd /isolinux/initrd0.img
   }
   
   menuentry "Fedora Live (Basic Video)" {
    linux /isolinux/vmlinuz0 root=live:LABEL=XYZ rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet  rhgb rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM xdriver=vesa nomodeset
    initrd /isolinux/initrd0.img
   }

   where XYZ must be replaced by the actual partition name of your USB partition.

8. Unmount and boot