writing to disk

Forum: USB booting
Topic: writing to disk
started by: eydaimon

Posted by eydaimon on Aug. 06 2007,16:18

Now being in a possession of a pocket drive which is non-flash based, but actually drive based, I now have even more interest in DSL as a dsl based O/S which also stores states and user dirs on a more retreivable basis.

Last I tried DSL wasn't really much tailored to writing things as CF has a limited lifespan as far as writing etc.

How are those things being developed now? any change?

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Aug. 06 2007,16:28

See the notes section (what you could call a changelog): < http://damnsmalllinux.org/notes.html >
I suppose the last time you tried DSL it was a very long time ago (pre-0.5?)

Posted by eydaimon on Aug. 06 2007,18:38

no, it was 3.2. I'm aware of the backup.tgz it makes.

What I really wanted on my 6gb pocket drive would be to dedicate 128mb to the O/S and have the rest be my fs of choice to store my homedir, and other things.

Posted by fioddor on Aug. 10 2007,23:06

Do you mean like this?: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki....ctories >

Posted by eydaimon on Aug. 11 2007,04:19

Quote (fioddor @ Aug. 10 2007,19:06)

Do you mean like this?: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki....ctories >

Hi, thank you for your response.
persistant homedirs in the form of a backup.tgz isn't what I am looking for.

I want to primarily use it as a storage device but have a small partition for linux. and be able to mount my homedir.

So I can use it on both windows machines and as a standalone linux machine.

Posted by roberts on Aug. 11 2007,05:13

Quote

persistant homedirs in the form of a backup.tgz

These are not the same thing. Persistent home directory is a mounted persistent store in the form of a supported writable filesystem, nothing to do with the backup.tar.gz which is the default.

Using the boot option of home=hda2 upon first use will setup a home directory on the specified device. Subsquent use will mount your home directory on device hda2 Any supported writable filesystem partition may be specified. This is typically used when the boot options are easily accesed as in a frugal or pendrive install.

Posted by eydaimon on Aug. 11 2007,08:40

Quote (roberts @ Aug. 11 2007,01:13)

Quote

persistant homedirs in the form of a backup.tgz

The bit that has put me off that approach is the necessity to having to type in a boot option each time. is there no way to store boot options to make them persistant too?

Posted by fioddor on Aug. 11 2007,09:25

Quote

is there no way to store boot options to make them persistant too?

You can either:

a) Store the boot options in your boot manager (grub, etc). At this moment I don't know how to do that exactly but it shouldn't be too difficult to find out the right file to edit.

b) Relink the directories from the flashdrive at boot.
The wiki has a section called "Start Programs At Boot" that points you to some relevant scripts. Others can be found in this page: < http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/DSL_Boot_Process >

The backup functionality is used as a mean to make those scripts persistant and thereby, make the whole system persistant.

Hope this helps.

Posted by roberts on Aug. 11 2007,13:33

Quote

The bit that has put me off that approach is the necessity to having to type in a boot option each time. is there no way to store boot options to make them persistant too?

It is really a simple matter to edit the boot loader append section depending on whether you are using grub, lilo, syslinux, isolinux,extlinux, loadlin, linld, etc, or even the boot floppy and of course the media involved. If only a CDROM then use mkmydsl to simply generate a new cd image to burn.

However, note that creating a regular directories on a usb device will quickly wear out the flash device just as doing a traditional hard drive install would.

The default approach that DSL uses, only write once per session (backup) is still the most flash friendly.

Posted by eydaimon on Aug. 11 2007,15:20

Quote (roberts @ Aug. 11 2007,09:33)

[quote]

The default approach that DSL uses, only write once per session (backup) is still the most flash friendly.

Do you know of any efforts which are geared for those of us, me for instance, who has a microdrive, or maybe even those who are not too worried about the lifetime of their flash?

Posted by roberts on Aug. 11 2007,17:09

Perhaps a simple mount --bind is all you need to begin to use your micro drive

Posted by curaga on Aug. 11 2007,17:18

eydaimon:
Then you can just use the normal HD (debian-type) install on your drive

Posted by eydaimon on Aug. 12 2007,04:00

thanks, I'll check that out as an option