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Re: Installing Debian on USB HDD



Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
Johnson, Chad wrote:

Hi,

I just bought a USB harddrive and I want to install Debian on it. I have a base Debian installed on a miniCD, and when I boot to the Debian installer and I get to the partitioning part, my drive is not listed, so I can't partition my drive.
Actually I would be interested in knowing how to do this too. What I would want to do is install a minimal debian system on 1gb flash usb 2 with maybe 1gb memory (to avoid swapping on flash...). Coupled with a low power / underclocked CPU, you could make very robust, fanless and noiseless workstations with no mechanical parts in them...

Cheers,
Jean-Michel.



I did this a few months ago on a 250 zip disk.

Are you using the new Debian-Installer on a Sarge iso or an old Woody iso?

In either case you need the usb mass storage module loaded. How you do this varies depending on what iso you have and its installer.

Once you finish your installation, you are going to need a boot CD w/a kernel ramdisk to load the usb storage module to boot into your usb drive. Unless you have a motherboard which supports booting from usb devices, which I doubt.

Also there is a Gentoo-based distro called FlashLinux which already all this sorted out, although it's not Debian-based.



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