For preparing the USB stick you will need a system where GNU/Linux is already running and where USB is supported. You should ensure that the usb-storage kernel module is loaded (modprobe usb-storage) and try to find out which SCSI device the USB stick has been mapped to (in this example /dev/sda is used). To write to your stick, you will probably have to turn off its write protection switch. Note, that the USB stick should be at least 128 MB in size (smaller setups are possible if you follow ). There is an all-in-one file hd-media/boot.img.gz which contains all the installer files (including the kernel) as well as SYSLINUX and its configuration file. You only have to extract it directly to to your USB stick: gzip -dc boot.img.gz >/dev/sda Of course this will destroy anything already on the device, so take care that you use the correct device name for your USB stick. After that, mount the USB memory stick (mount /dev/sda /mnt), which will now have a FAT filesystem on it, and copy a Debian netinst or businesscard ISO image to it. Please note that the file name must end in .iso. Unmount the stick (umount /mnt) and you are done. If you like more flexibility or just want to know what's going on, you should use the following method to put the files on your stick. We will show how to setup the memory stick to use the first partition, instead of entire device. Since most USB sticks come pre-configured with a single FAT16 partition, you probably won't have to repartition or reformat the stick. If you have to do that anyway, use cfdisk or any other partitioning tool for creating a FAT16 partition and then type mkdosfs /dev/sda1 Take care that you use the correct device name for your USB stick. The mkdosfs command is contained in the dosfstools Debian package. In order to start the kernel after booting from the USB stick, we will put a boot loader on the stick. Although any boot loader (e.g. LILO) should work, it's convenient to use SYSLINUX, since it uses a FAT16 partition and can be reconfigured by just editing a text file. Any operating system which supports the FAT file system can be used to make changes to the configuration of the boot loader. To put SYSLINUX on the FAT16 partition on your USB stick, install the syslinux and mtools packages on your system, and type syslinux /dev/sda1 Again, take care that you use the correct device name. The partition must not be mounted when starting SYSLINUX. This procedure writes a boot sector to the partition and creates the file ldlinux.sys which contains the boot loader code. Mount the parition (mount /dev/sda1 /mnt) and copy the following files from the Debian archives to the stick: vmlinuz (kernel binary) initrd.gz (initial ramdisk image) syslinux.cfg (SYSLINUX configuration file) Optional kernel modules If you want to rename the files, please note that SYSLINUX can only process DOS (8.3) file names. The syslinux.cfg configuration file should contain the following two lines: default vmlinuz append initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=10000 root=/dev/rd/0 init=/linuxrc devfs=mount,dall rw Please note, that the ramdisk_size parameter may need to be increased, depending on the image you are booting. Now you should put any Debian ISO image (businesscard, netinst or even a full one) onto your stick (if it fits). The file name of such an image must end in .iso. If you want to install over the network, without using an ISO image, you will of course skip the previous step. Moreover you will have to use the initial ramdisk from the netboot directory instead of the one from hd-media, because hd-media/initrd.gz does not have network support. When you are done, unmount the USB memory stick (umount /mnt) and activate its write protection switch. If your system refuses to boot from the memory stick, the stick may contain an invalid master boot record (MBR). To fix this, use the install-mbr command from the package mbr: install-mbr /dev/sda