Re: Installation failed
On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:42:56 -0500
Mark Filipak <markfilipak.linux@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2013/3/1 3:29 PM, Go Linux wrote:
>
> > Duh . . . How about installing on an external hard drive?
>
> That would be nice, but that would be on USB also...
>
And if the computer's hardware can deal with USB hard drives, and
anything recent can, there is no problem. Any OS will treat it like any
other hard drive. Windows will make use of the BIOS, Linux will drive
it directly.
USB *sticks* can have problems. They normally come as a single partition
i.e. with no partition table, and this will freak out anything that
expects one. I have trouble mounting and dismounting *some* USB sticks
on my Sid installation. I've had to reformat a few to make them usable.
I don't think the whole-drive format is as well standardised as the
normal multi-partition arrangement.
It is possible to make a normal partition table, but they don't come
like that. The one I carry around has ext3 and FAT32 partitions, and I
don't really mind that Windows machines can only see the second.
But given the write speed of most flash memory, a USB hard drive will
give much better performance, as well as much more space, and you
don't need to worry about wear optimisation or limiting. I've mentioned
that I have a Sid USB hard drive installation which boots on every
normal PC I've tried it with. Install what you like, configure what you
like, it's just a normal hard drive installation.
You install it as you would any hard drive installation: boot from an
installation ISO medium, normally CD, and tell the installer which drive
you want to use. The usual method with Debian is to use the network
installation ISO, which is very small, and then to add software from
the Net. That way you don't get unnecessary stuff.
If you don't want Stable, then you switch repositories and do a
dist-upgrade of the original Net installation, as there's not much
there to upgrade, and it saves downloading or copying a lot of Stable
and then throwing it away. Installation uses the physical hardware of
the host machine, but not its OS. I installed 32-bit Debian on the drive
while it was attached to my 64-bit workstation. You may want to tidy
up /etc/fstab afterwards, as it will also contain all the host's
partitions.
Unstable can be a bit tricky at times, and needs a lot of updating as
it's a rolling distribution, but I've only needed to reinstall twice in
about eight years of running it. I use an Unstable workstation, so I
pretty well copied it to the USB drive, using dpkg --get-selections.
Using Unison to synchronise data, given that most places I go have a PC
I can borrow, I effectively have a laptop that fits in a small pocket
but uses a big monitor, and has a much faster big brother at home. That
really does look like the sort of thing you want.
And yes, this mucking about with USB sticks and external hard drives is
a bit more complicated than a Windows installation, but then you can't
do this kind of thing with Windows *at* *all*. You can install Windows
to an internal hard drive *from* a USB stick, and some recent server
versions come as ISOs which don't fit on optical media so this is
necessary, but you can't install *to* a removable drive. Windows will
not boot if the hardware around it changes more than slightly, it is
necessary to re-register it with Microsoft, and it's up to Microsoft
whether to permit it.
--
Joe
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