GRUB installation fails on a live USB thumb drive

[derwunner]

Hi,
my aim was to make a multi boot USB thumb drive with 3 primary partitions (all formatted with ext3). The first one is the boot partition, got a size of 4 GB and was created for BT5. This partition was called 'backtrack'
I tried this on my notebook within an openSUSE 11.4 standard installation. I followed also this official tutorial: http://www.infosecramblings.com/back...changesnessus/
But this command

grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt/bt5 /dev/sdb

told me this:

WARNING! You are trying to invoke the unsupported grub-install script
with a parameter. To really do this, call grub-install.unsupported.
You should rather call "yast2 bootloader" or create configuration files
appropriate for the intended target.

So, I thought 'OK, why not?' and I tried this command:

grub-install.unsupported --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt/bt5 /dev/sdb

but this command failed, too with this error message:

Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time.
/usr/sbin/grub-install.unsupported: Zeile 444: /usr/sbin/grub-set-default: File or directory not found.
The file /mnt/bt5/boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.

I have read the error message, but I did not understand, what it wants to tell me. I did not try this command again, I just stopped after this error message. So please help me, I actually do not know what the problem is.

My BT5 partition at the moment looks like this:

ls -l /mnt/bt5
totally 19
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root  1024  3. Jul 13:27 boot
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root  1024  3. Jul 13:24 casper
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root  1024  3. Jul 13:24 isolinux
drwx------ 2 root root 12288  3. Jul 13:07 lost+found
-r--r--r-- 1 root root  1183  3. Jul 13:16 md5sum.txt
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root  1024  3. Jul 13:24 preseed
-r--r--r-- 1 root root   200  3. Jul 13:16 README.diskdefines
-r--r--r-- 1 root root     0  3. Jul 13:16 ubuntu

And yes I know, openSUSE uses the latest stable GRUB 1 version. But I think, this is not the problem, is not it?

Thanks for help,
cheers, derwunner

PS: Sorry for my bad english, I usually speak german ;-)

[sickness]

Try following the official tutorials for Backtrack 5 from our Wiki

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/wiki/..._USB_Installer
http://www.backtrack-linux.org/wiki/...Persistent_USB

[derwunner]

I did basically the same steps in my persistent USB thumb drive, as described in the BT Wiki (your last link). But instead of using syslinux on a fat32 partition I would do it the direct and simplier way with GRUB on an ext3 partition. That´s better for later, if all distributions work fine, I will have it simplier e. g. to create my own background boot image.
So, why it does not work over the direct way with ext3 and GRUB? In my opinion syslinux and fat32 is a detour for making the USB thumb drive boot able.