RE: Making a Debian Bootable USB Pen Drive
Nuno:
"Don't! Nothing should be installed on a flash drive. A traditional
install was meant for hard drives, not flash drives. Browser cache,
/tmp, syslog and so on will damage the device."
Andrew:
" I assume you
are trying to avoid the damage caused by longterm heavy writing which
"wears out" flash memory, right? "
Me:
Is the heavy writing that Andrew mentioned the only thing that would ruin
it, or are there other concerns?
And also, has anyone ever had a usb flash drive actually wear out? I'm
somewhat skeptical that having your OS entirely on a flash-drive would
really ruin it. Of course, I've never tried it. But I don't think I've
ever heard anyone mention that their flash drive died on them.
Thanks,
- GM
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Sackville-West [mailto:andrew@farwestbilliards.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 1:35 PM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Making a Debian Bootable USB Pen Drive
On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 07:33:23AM -0700, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> Nuno Miguel dos Santos Baeta wrote:
>
> > Hi!
> >
> > I want to install Debian in a USB pen drive.
>
> Don't! Nothing should be installed on a flash drive. A traditional
> install was meant for hard drives, not flash drives. Browser cache,
> /tmp, syslog and so on will damage the device.
I have only loosely been following this thread, but am curious about
this sort of thing in general. so what if you mount /tmp on tmpfs
(thus putting it in memory or swap dependingon memory loads) and I
wonder, can you change where syslog puts its logs (like into tmp) and
then build some script to save it off when you shutdown? I assume you
are trying to avoid the damage caused by longterm heavy writing which
"wears out" flash memory, right? Likewise, what about putting together
a file on whatever harddrive exists (a la knoppix and dsl use of a
swapfile) as a place to mount /var and /tmp while running the system
and again, copy it off to the usb drive during shutdown so that the
info is archived, but the writes to flash are minimized.
>
> If you want to run a distro from a usb device, like I do, use a so
> called 'frugall install': partition your drive in two (you can use
> loop files if you prefer), put a live iso in the first partition and
> save you data onto the second partition when you are done.
> Knoppix, live.debian.net or damn Small Linux will do the job.
>
I agree that this is a much better solution.
just my .02
A
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