We will show how to setup the memory stick to use the first partition, instead of the 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 to create a FAT16 partition, and then create the filesystem using: # 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 do: # 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 partition (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=12000 root=/dev/ram rw Please note that the ramdisk_size parameter may need to be increased, depending on the image you are booting.