On 11/25/2015 07:47 PM, rlharris@oplink.net wrote:
On Wed, November 25, 2015 9:37 pm, David Christensen wrote:No, I'm talking about disconnecting all hard disk drives and solid state drives, plugging in a USB flash drive, booting a Debian installer CD, and installing Debian onto the USB flash drive.Which arrangement sounds like exactly what I wished to find. Thanks much; I shall give it a try.
Please do; it's a useful trick.Beware that not all USB ports are created equal -- e.g. for some machines/ motherboards, I've found that the Debian-on-USB-flash-drive trick only works on a specific port (typically the USB port next to the Ethernet port).
Dare I ask whether this would work with a USB-interface drive such as the Toshiba Canvio Connect II (reformatted, for example, to ext4)?
I suppose. But, I prefer small, dedicated, solid-state system drives. (I use SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 16 GB flash drives.) Once booted, you can connect additional external drives, connect to Samba shares on a LAN/ VLAN, connect to external hosts/ file systems via SCP/ SSH over a LAN/ VLAN/ WAN, etc.. If you include openssh-server, you can also get in from other machines.
That said, there are valid reasons for putting the rescue operating system and the images on one large capacity device -- for example, if the computer has only one USB port. (The Ultra Fit is available in a 128 GB version; I recently bought one.)
In either case, give yourself plenty of options by installing plenty of tools when you create the Debian-on-USB system. As you find that you want more, install (or write) it.
David