is a persistent usb boot drive truly portable

[sudodus]

Hi everybody,

I know about usb boot drives and that they can be made persistent with a r/w file system. But what happens if I travel with the usb stick and want to use it somewhere else? Will it

- boot nicely?
- find the personal files?
- run whatever tweaks or software is on the r/w file system?

In other words, is a persistent usb boot drive truly portable?

[An Sanct]

Welcome to the forums!

The general answer is yes.

The USB will boot just like at your machine and bring up the desktop you left behind since the last use. Browser bookmarks, cookies history and saved passwords will be preserved. Most settings you applied will be preserved. Any installed software will be present.

I personally use the 32bit version, so there are no conflicts. You cannot run 64bit Live OS on a non-64bit machine (!) So use 32bits for maximum compatibility.

Do not enable any additional hardware drivers, that need proprietary downloads/installs (mostly GPU and networking)

PS. Offcourse, if you have a fast machine like a quad core i5 or better and then run the Live session on a 1Ghz single core processor, everything will run slower (obviously).

PS2. I have my "work desk" on such an USB, LAMP, MySQL*, different browsers, ...

[sudodus]

Great news :KS

I'll go ahead to make and test it

[An Sanct]

Hint:
Never update system components on a Live Session USB, most updates will break the system or fail.
Installs can take a while, but normally they complete okay, if they fail the first time, the second time they wont. :)

Anyhow :) a Live USB is a nice playground for testing ;) can't break anything :)

[sudodus]

Thanks for the tips!

Now I am running a live USB flash drive with Lubuntu. It works in standard volatile mode as well as in persistent mode.

The 16 GB drive is partitioned with Gparted. The first partition is used as a data partition because Windows can read it. (At least older Windows systems can only read the first partition on a USB drive.) See the attached picture.

I used the method in
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/how-to-create-a-larger-casper-rw-loop-file/
to make a 4 GB casper-rw file, that should be in the root directory of the second partition (that will be mounted to /cdrom during the live session).

Unetbootin was used to make the USB flash drive a live system from an iso file (in this case lubuntu-11.10-desktop-i386.iso).


ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sdb: 16.0 GB, 16028794368 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1948 cylinders, total 31306239 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x25bf25be

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 63 17607239 8803588+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2 * 17607240 28097684 5245222+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb3 28097685 30202199 1052257+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/cow 1808104 70412 1737692 4% /
udev 1800780 4 1800776 1% /dev
tmpfs 723244 852 722392 1% /run
/dev/sdb2 5234980 4885160 349820 94% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 624512 624512 0 100% /rofs
tmpfs 1808104 12 1808092 1% /tmp
none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
none 1808104 0 1808104 0% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1 8794976 3601712 5193264 41% /media/USB-DATA
/dev/sr1 6828 6828 0 100% /media/U3 System
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="USB-DATA" UUID="5921-6A05" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdb2: LABEL="USB-OS" UUID="5939-AF2D" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdb3: UUID="3379d9fb-860b-41c3-9102-2c36d5640f12" TYPE="swap"
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ls -lha /cdrom
total 4.1G
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4.0K 1970-01-01 00:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 220 2011-12-18 10:50 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 144 2011-10-12 18:04 autorun.inf
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:07 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 22:59 casper
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0G 2011-12-17 04:49 casper-rw
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:07 .disk
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:07 dists
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:12 install
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12K 2011-12-16 21:12 isolinux
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 15K 2011-12-16 21:12 ldlinux.sys
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5.6K 2011-10-12 18:04 md5sum.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:12 pics
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:07 pool
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2011-12-16 21:12 preseed
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 226 2011-10-12 18:04 README.diskdefines
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.3K 2011-12-16 21:35 syslinux.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5.1K 2011-12-16 21:12 ubnfilel.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14M 2011-10-12 18:04 ubninit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.5M 2011-10-12 18:04 ubnkern
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.2K 2011-12-16 21:07 ubnpathl.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 142K 2011-12-16 21:13 vesamenu.c32
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2.4M 2011-10-12 18:04 wubi.exeFinally I edited the file syslinux.cfg (the red test in two lines) to make the system use the casper-rw file.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ cat /cdrom/syslinux.cfg
default vesamenu.c32
prompt 0
menu title UNetbootin
timeout 100

label unetbootindefault
menu label Default Lubuntu 11.10 *persistent*
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit file=/cdrom/preseed/lubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash persistent --

label ubnentry0
menu label ^Help
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit

label ubnentry1
menu label ^Try Lubuntu without installing
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append initrd=/casper/initrd.lz file=/cdrom/preseed/lubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash --

label ubnentry2
menu label ^Install Lubuntu
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append initrd=/casper/initrd.lz file=/cdrom/preseed/lubuntu.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity quiet splash --

label ubnentry3
menu label ^Check disc for defects
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append initrd=/casper/initrd.lz boot=casper integrity-check quiet splash --

label ubnentry4
menu label Test ^memory
kernel /install/mt86plus
append initrd=/ubninit

label ubnentry5
menu label ^Boot from first hard disk
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit

label ubnentry6
menu label ^Back..
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit

label ubnentry7
menu label menu
kernel /isolinux/vesamenu.c32
append initrd=/ubninit

label ubnentry8
menu label oem=OEM install (for manufacturers)
kernel /ubnkern
append initrd=/ubninit oem=oem-config/enable=true

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$
The mounted persistent file system:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/cow 4127424 770640 3147120 20% /
udev 1800772 4 1800768 1% /dev
tmpfs 723244 852 722392 1% /run
/dev/sdb2 5234980 4885160 349820 94% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 624512 624512 0 100% /rofs
tmpfs 1808104 4 1808100 1% /tmp
none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
none 1808104 0 1808104 0% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1 8794976 3601776 5193200 41% /media/USB-DATA
/dev/sr1 6828 6828 0 100% /media/U3 System
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$
I have installed some favourite software and updated the system

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgradeand selected locale (language and keyboard).

It works quite well and it is truly portable :-)