Re: Debian using USB stick on diskless machine
David, thanks for the suggestions.
I think if I had run debian installer from one flash drive and
installed onto another flash drive things would have gone more
smoothly.
I managed to get things mostly working. It was extremely ugly. I'll
try to post full details later, but basically
inserted USB stick in my main machine
overwrote start with zero's to wipe out traces of the boot for the
iso, which seemed to make grub-install unwilling to do anything.
chroot into the disk, edit grub's device map, and install.
Then I stuck the stick in the diskless machine and booted; there were
a bunch of errors in the early boot process about missing files, but
the system started. I reran update-initramfs and update-grub and
rebooted.
Things seem mostly OK, although there are weird vestigas of the live
cd, like update-initramfs is linked to live-update-initramfs.
The system is a bit sluggish; maybe ext4 on lvm wasn't the best choice for it.
Ross
On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 11:46 PM, David Christensen
<dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> wrote:
> On 12/28/2015 04:08 PM, Ross Boylan wrote:
>>
>> I have a diskless machine and figured it would be quicker to get it
>> running off a USB thumb drive than PXE boot. I'd appreciate any
>> suggestions or advice.
>
>
> That's one of my favorite tricks. I typically boot and install from an
> optical disk to avoid confusion. I prefer SanDisk Ultra Fit 16 GB USB 3.0
> flash drives because they are compact, fast, and inexpensive. I use the d-i
> to partition them manually -- 0.5 GB ext4 boot, 0.5 GB random key LUKS swap,
> and 13.4 GB password LUKS ext4 or btrfs root.
>
>
> On some machines:
>
> 1. You may need to go into CMOS setup after the Debian installer runs and
> configure the BIOS to boot from the USB flash drive (details vary by vendor
> and revision).
>
> 2. Not all the USB ports are created equal. If the one you installed to
> won't work for boot, try another.
>
>
>> I stuck Debian live on the thumb drive but discovered changes I made
>> in that environment were not persistent.
>
>
> There are specific methods for persistence on Debian Live:
>
>
> https://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/live-manual/html/live-manual.en.html#556
>
>
> David
>
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