Installing to a USB drive

This subforum seems to be full of people who have no idea (not an insult, I mean that just regarding to Wii Linux), so I thought I'd answer a common query - how to load it off a USB drive. It's quite simple in theory, and will get simpler once I update Boot It to use MIKE.

1) Create an ext2 partition on the USB drive. Remember the partition number for later, for the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to say it is 2. Ext2 is recommended for flash drives, ext3 for hard drives (or ext4 if the kernel supports it - I don't know if it does or not).

2) Extract the filesystem tarball directly onto the partition (if you need to copy or move files at all, you've done it wrong)

3) Grab whatever kernel you want to use

4) Open it up in your favourite hex editor

5) Ctrl + F for the character string "hex"

6) Find the bit where it says /dev/mmcblk0p2 OR /dev/rvlsda2 (depending on which kernel you downloaded)

7) Change this to /dev/sda2 (remembering to change 2 to your partition number).

8) Copy the rest of the arguments backwards so there is an 0x20 after that argument and then the rest of them

9) Add 0x20s to the end to pad out the gaps where the rest of the arguments might still have a residue

10) Load the kernel as normal

11) Hope

I haven't written this very clearly as I have no idea of hex-editting terminology, so if you find you cannot do the hex editing and get a bootable kernel, just tell me exactly which kernel you want, and the partition number, and I can do it for you