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View Full Version : [SOLVED] Does portable USB Ubuntu write to hard drive?



clay7
June 20th, 2011, 04:21 PM
Hello,

If I have Ubuntu installed on a USB drive and run it on a PC (not installing to the PC...just running the Live version), is anything at all written to the host PC's hard drive? I don't want the host PC's hard drive to be written to at all for security purposes. I'd be using Firefox, LibreOffice, and other apps that come with the Live USB version.

Thanks!

Allavona
June 20th, 2011, 04:47 PM
I have a friend who disconnects his HDD and uses a 32GB USB drive that has Linux installed. This way he ensures that no info is written to his HDD. MacPup E17 is what he's using, I think.

mlentink
June 20th, 2011, 06:01 PM
You could write to it if you mount it. Which means you would have to want to write to it.

clay7
June 20th, 2011, 06:28 PM
Thanks for the replies and info!

So, unless I mount a drive, no temp or system files are written to a hard drive? Or to a swap portion of a drive?

oldfred
June 20th, 2011, 06:54 PM
If you do not want it to use swap you may have to set the noswap parameter on boot. Many liveCDs use swap to speed up an install, so they mount swap if found on the hard drive. If you have a lot of RAM on the computer it may not use swap anyway.

clay7
June 20th, 2011, 09:23 PM
Good deal...thanks to all! Marking as solved.