Quick transcript my of Debian netboot installation on USB keychain

Don't forget what you need to make partition active in fdisk or install-mbr won't help!

dpavlin@eeepy:~$ sudo apt-get install syslinux mbr

root@eeepy:~# install-mbr /dev/sdc

root@eeepy:~# syslinux /dev/sdc1
root@eeepy:~# mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb/
root@eeepy:~# cd /mnt/usb
root@eeepy:/mnt/usb# wget http://ftp.hr.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/linux
root@eeepy:/mnt/usb# wget http://ftp.hr.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz
root@eeepy:/mnt/usb# wget http://ftp.hr.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso

# ipw2200 firmware
wget http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php?i_agree_to_the_license=yes&f=ipw2200-fw-3.0.tgz
tar xvfz ipw2200*.tgz

root@eeepy:/mnt/usb# echo -e "default linux\nappend priority=low vga=normal "  "initrd=initrd.gz ramdisk_size=12000 root=/dev/ram rw" >> syslinux.cfg

root@eeepy:/mnt/usb# cd ..
root@eeepy:/mnt# umount /mnt/usb 

If you get following output:

MBR FA:

you didn't make first partition active.

root@t42:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 503 MB, 503709696 bytes
16 heads, 61 sectors/track, 1008 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 976 * 512 = 499712 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1008      491873+   6  FAT16