[Leaplist] Booting from a usb drive

[Richard F. Ostrow Jr.]

Note that not all machines are capable of booting USB devices. In fact,
none of the machines I own have this capability (from an Athlon64 X2 4400+
to a mini-itx via machine).

One thing to keep in mind when using flash-based devices for general use
is that flash has a limited number of writes before it's toast. There are
ways of overcoming this, however... for example, you could use unionfs to
mount the flash read-only and write all the changes to tmpfs (a RAM disk).
Upon shutdown, you can consolidate all your changes and write just the
diffs back to the stick via rsync. I'm working on such a solution right
now with my vehicle PC (using CF flash). Two things make this difficult:

1. unionfs is not built into any kernel - it must be patched in (which
means you *will* be building a kernel from source code)
2. making root work on unionfs requires that you use initrd
-- 
Life without passion is death in disguise

On Fri, November 30, 2007 9:16 am, Bob Hicks wrote:
> Unfortunately, other commitments keep me from coming to the Installfest
> to see if the following is possible.
>
> I would like to boot a linux distro from a usb drive. I would like to be
> able to use that drive for everything linux...saving files, etc. The
> reason I want to do this is that I have a laptop. One the last one I
> had, I tried to set up a dual boot with Windows and Linux. I succeeded
> in destroying the Windows OS, so I made it a total linux machine for the
> purpose of learning. Now, I have a new machine. It is necessary to keep
> the Windows operating system...I don't want to take a chance of losing
> that. My solution, if possible, would be to boot and operate from a usb
> drive. If it is possible, could someone tell me, step by step, how I
> should go about it. I would be using the Kubuntu distro, most likely the
> 64 bit, if possible. Thank you for any help you can give.
>
> Bob Hicks
>
> --
> Benjamin Franklin "The man who trades freedom for security does not
> deserve nor will he ever receive either"
> Benjamin Franklin "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
> little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety".
>
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