Installing to USB Pen Drive.

[jso23]

Hello Everyone!

I have absolutely fallen in love with Ubuntu! WOW!

Here is my situation and here is what I want to do:

I have a Toshiba Satellite A65-S1066 Laptop with USB 2.0 on it. I have XP installed on the hard drive. I want to be able to install Ubuntu onto a USB pen drive. Unfortunately, my laptop does not boot from a USB device.

Is there a way for me to:

1. Install Unbuntu to a USB pen drive (1 GB or so)
2. Boot to a CD that allows me to boot the pen drive with GRUB or something
3. Run Ubuntu from the pen drive

This is an ideal situation for me. No, call it a DREAM situation for me.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Love & Light,

Justin

[avallon]

I would like to join you in your "dreamland", since my dream is very similar:

I have 2.5" 40GB notebook hard drive which is set in a Chronos USB external casing. Wonderful solution for extra space, very portable - about 200 grams of weight, and far bigger than any USB key/pen etc. and at the fraction of the cost.

I would like to install any Linux distribution on it, and then connect this to any PC/Notebook of my choice and boot it from there.

This is surely possible, since Mandrake have done it with their portable hard drive and Mandrake Move. The set up is called Globe Troter and it costs about 220 USD.

I have already my 40GB USB drive, Mandrake 10, Ubuntu live and Ubuntu install, and Impi 1, Impi2, Suse 9.1

Open for suggestions and experiments?

p.s. I have tried to do this with Partition Magic and Boot Magic and failed terribly.

[rolf]

Originally Posted by jso23 Is there a way for me to: 1. Install Unbuntu to a USB pen drive (1 GB or so) 2. Boot to a CD that allows me to boot the pen drive with GRUB or something 3. Run Ubuntu from the pen drive

1.) Yes. You can mount and install ubuntu on a USB device (just mount and install to that device).

2.) Hmm. Not that I am aware of. There may be some experimental projects that force USB booting, but I am not aware of any that are publicly available. Keep an eye on the Smart Boot Manager folks (google it for home page or sourceforge entry). The easy answer may be a BIOS upgrade that enables USB booting!

3.) You could drop the warty live cd image onto a USB device using something like partimage (google).

HTH,
rolf

[zenwhen]

Please keep in mind that flash media does not stand up to constant read/writes like a regular hard disk does. Yes, the number of read/writes it can take is HUGE, but with the swapping in and out of files that occurs when you are running an OS from the drive, I wouldn't expect the thumb drive to last long.

[fimblo]

Originally Posted by zenwhen Please keep in mind that flash media does not stand up to constant read/writes like a regular hard disk does. Yes, the number of read/writes it can take is HUGE, but with the swapping in and out of files that occurs when you are running an OS from the drive, I wouldn't expect the thumb drive to last long.

Very true. It costs to write to flash memory- so you can only write to it so many times. On the other hand, the price of reading from flash is much cheaper. At least thats my impression after googling around.

So what I've done is install the system onto three usb pen drives - one for root partition, one for /var, and one for /usr. my /tmp directory is symlinked from /var/realtmp. As almost all runtime writes go to /var and /tmp on my htpc, this works quite well. I used a separate 4G flash memory for /usr, since I'll be wanting to install more stuff on the machine later on.

This being said, I've just installed the system and Im hoping my plans work out. It would be a pain if the system died suddenly due to worn out flash...

[Waldo323]

Originally Posted by fimblo Very true. It costs to write to flash memory- so you can only write to it so many times. On the other hand, the price of reading from flash is much cheaper. At least thats my impression after googling around. So what I've done is install the system onto three usb pen drives - one for root partition, one for /var, and one for /usr. my /tmp directory is symlinked from /var/realtmp. As almost all runtime writes go to /var and /tmp on my htpc, this works quite well. I used a separate 4G flash memory for /usr, since I'll be wanting to install more stuff on the machine later on. This being said, I've just installed the system and Im hoping my plans work out. It would be a pain if the system died suddenly due to worn out flash...

ah but there is the beauty of your setup, you can back those flash drives up periodically(possibly have 6 and rsync the data with a backup flash drive, or you could back up to a hard drive, cd/dvd or whatever works for you) so if/when one fails you can copy the latest back up to a new flash drive (or if the media you backed up to is rewritable you could just use that)

[fimblo]

I've tested it now for some six days or so, the OS itself worked beautifully, but I felt that it was... alittle slow. It was fun to play with, but the day before yesterday I decided to ditch the solution in favour of using a 2.5" hdd I had lying around. At 5400rpm its quite silent- but still a heck of a lot faster than the USB disks.

Aw well. It was fun while it lasted

[NULL712]

I would like to know how you installed ubuntu on multiple flash drives! And all the specs for your sett up like the size of the drives, number of drives, version of ubuntu, etc. I think this project is entertaining and would like to attempt to breath life back into it. I also have other ideas that won't be reviled at the moment.

Thanx alot

[eeried]

Originally Posted by NULL712 I also have other ideas that won't be reviled at the moment.

I hope you mean "revealed" not "reviled at"

[fimblo]

Originally Posted by NULL712 I would like to know how you installed ubuntu on multiple flash drives! And all the specs for your sett up like the size of the drives, number of drives, version of ubuntu, etc. I think this project is entertaining and would like to attempt to breath life back into it. I also have other ideas that won't be reviled at the moment. Thanx alot

Hiya,

Im afraid I've reformatted the usb flash sticks, cant give you details from there. But I think I remember some stuff:

I used the Ubuntu Alternative installation CD. (Feisty)

Like I wrote earlier, I used three sticks, each with one partition on it. In retrospection I think a 1G stick for root was superfluous, since the two directories there which take up most space (/usr and /var) were already on separate partitions on other physical sticks (I dont install things into /opt).

I skipped creating a swap space, since I seldom need it. I figured that should I find myself needing it, I could stick in another stick and do a mkswap/swapon, alternatively create a swap file.

So if you're just testing around with a mediabox, this would be my minimal recommendation of usb stick sizes and where to mount them.

64M root (/)
2G /usr (question is if you even need this much, depends on what you install)
2G /var (again, depends on what applications you have installed)

I used
1G root
4G /usr
4G /var

If you want to be able to save video/audio, you'll want a real hard disk around tho. USB flash is still too expensive if you want a 100G of it.

Finally: I think you should test around and get the feel of it. If you're secret project is a business startup I suggest you spend a week or two reading thru relevant parts of the excellent documentation over at the linux documentation project (http://www.tldp.org). Read the LFS (linux from scratch) documentation (www.linuxfromscratch.org), for some real good tips. Then take a look at how others have crammed linux into various media. I suggest starting to look at how tomsrtbt is set up, then following thru with damnsmalllinux and finishing with slax, together with the "linux live!" toolkit. Quite useful.

Hope this helps