[oclug] RE: Linux on USB (Was: Lexar Secure problem)

[Messier, Jean-Francois]

Mandrake offer a hard-disk based USB drive, all with their distro
installed on it, for about $199. I preferred to have some challenge, and
find one that I can install on an existing HD. I also heard that the
latest MDK could be installed on a USB hard disk, just have to select
/dev/sda1 in the installation process. It did not work on my LaCie
portable hard disk, but I guess this is because that was an early model.

JF

-----Original Message-----
From: oclug-bounces at lists.oclug.on.ca
[mailto:oclug-bounces at lists.oclug.on.ca] On Behalf Of Jarrod Major
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 13:32
To: 'General Membership Discussion List'
Subject: RE: [oclug] Lexar Secure problem

> Got the new LinuxFormat and there it is (FlashLinux)! Now to read up
on
> it and brace myself to take the plunge.
> 
> Checked my boot order and found I have floppy cdrom hd lan. No USB so
I
> guess I'll be making a boot floppy or modifying my existing GRUB.
Hmm...
> guess I'll probably need a floppy for the Winlose machine.
> 
> I've got a 20GB FireFly USB drive that I might eventually try it on if
> the JumpDrive installation is successful.
> 
> Thanks for your replies - any hints, tips etc. will be gratefully
> accepted :-)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, FeatherLinux is a good way to go.
It's
based on Knoppix and the documentation on the site is rock solid.

The gotchas are the boot floppy requirement if your BIOS doesn't support
booting from USB as you have indicated. Depending on which version of
USB
you have, you will need to try one of the three boot images that they
provide. The other gotcha is making the USB drive bootable...
considering
you can't boot USB from the machine you describe, you could skip that
step.
I could be wrong about this. I made mine bootable as my machine here at
work
supports booting from USB.

The procedure to make a USB drive bootable is pretty basic and it too is
well documented. You utilize syslinux to do this because the filesystem
is
vfat.

For the record, I used a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium with 512Mb of space and
it
worked just ducky. One of the nice things about FeatherLinux is that you
can
store your settings so once you have networking and email all set up,
you
can save your settings so you don't have to enter them again.

The USB hard drive sounds very interesting... a totally portable
environment
with lots of room to play. I imagine it would run pretty slow on USB 1
but
on USB 2 it would be very zippy.

Jarrod

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