USB Thumbdrive HD Install

Forum: HD Install
Topic: USB Thumbdrive HD Install
started by: Aeros_Saga

Posted by Aeros_Saga on Jan. 16 2004,00:51

I got a successful install of DSL on my thumbdrive, but how can I boot it? The flonix bootdisk would boot it when it was a compressed system, but now that its a debian install it will not. Can anyone point me to a DSL bootdisk that will boot a hd install from sda1? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Aeros

Posted by edudlive on Jan. 16 2004,01:32

check your BIOS

My A7N8X allows me to boot from USB HDD.

Posted by Aeros_Saga on Jan. 16 2004,02:12

My computer does not support USB boot directly and there is no bios update available, so that option is not available to me. Thanks for the suggestion though, any other thoughts?

Regards,

Aeros

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 16 2004,04:47

Don't do an hd-install of DSL on to a USB flash drive or thumbdrive.

Flash memory only allows a limited number of write commands before the memory will fail (10,000 writes or so).

If you install DSL to the USB drive and perform disk-intensive operations like SWAP file/ SWAP partition, or when you create LOG files or database files, many writes are peformed against the same area of your flash drive and it will fail soon.

If you wish to use Linux on a USB flash drive, please do one of the following:

Install it via the READ-ONLY compressed filesystem. Do not create a swap partition on the remainder of the flash drive.

OR:

Install a version of Linux that supports the JFFS2 file system and install it on a JFFS2 USB partition. The JFFS2 file system is designed to work with flash memory. It will not re-use a specific location on your flash drive until it has already written to all of the other locations. This is good because it extends the life of the device. Check it out:

< http://sources.redhat.com/jffs2/ >

Posted by Aeros_Saga on Jan. 16 2004,07:05

Thanks for the insight. Excellent sources as well.

Regards,

Aeros

Posted by Aeros_Saga on Jan. 17 2004,17:39

Any ideas on a good Thubdrive distro that incluedes support for the jffs2?

Regards,

Aeros