Quick and dirty "debian live" on USB stick.

[Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com>]

I'm playing with the idea of copying my laptop's debian lenny partition
to a USB stick that I can take with me when traveling.

Since I can't be sure I'll have a machine with available space on the
HDD or be allowed to partition the drive, what I thought was that I
could have a bootable system on the USB stick and boot into it pretty
much as I would off of a live CD. 

What I had in mind was as simple as:

. clone the lenny partition to /dev/sda1
. install grub to /dev/sda
. make adjustments to the contents of /dev/sda1

The trouble is that I don't have a machine that can boot off of a USB
stick to test ahead of time.

Adjustments that I had in mind:

. /etc/fstab 
. /boot/grub/menu.lst (grub.cfg with grub2)

Naturally, reconfiguring network & internet access, Xorg, printers, etc.
will be necessary, but they cannot be done ahead of time - although it
may be possible to make it less of a pain with some preparation and a
bit of scripting.

Since I'm running the stock lenny kernel, I shouldn't have problems with
differences in hardware, but I'm a little concerned that udev might not
cooperate.

I'm sure there are other issues, but unfortunately, I can't take the
trial and error approach.

So, I was wondering if anyone had done anything comparable, and would
care to point out possible gotchas?

Thanks,

CJ