Flash drive booting project questions Post: 302510318

Sponsored Content

Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Flash drive booting project questions Post 302510318 by Zygomorph on Sunday 3rd of April 2011 01:11:27 AM

04-03-2011

Registered User

Flash drive booting project questions

My current machine is a Macbook pro running Snow Leopard. I want to mess around with various *nix OSes but not in a way that threatens the current working condition of this machine. The way around this seems to be to install various operating systems on a largish flash drive, boot from that, and mess around on the drive itself without touching the hard disk. My tentative plan is something like this.

Use a 16 gig flash drive as a boot disk for various systems, partitioned four ways into 4 gig partitions. I'm planning on putting FreeBSD on one partition, Arch Linux on another, Haiku on a third, and using the fourth as a communal swap space.
Use a 1 gig flash drive as an installation medium, i.e. turn it into a live bootable drive for whatever OS I want to install at the time.

Before beginning this project, I have a few questions.

1) Is this even remotely a good idea?

2) Will 4 gig partitions be enough? I know Arch can be run on practically nothing, and the FAQs for FBSD and Haiku imply that 4 gigs are within the minimum system requirements, but that doesn't really explain how constraining such an environment would be.

3) Should I include a swap partition on the flash drive? It doesn't seem to be good for the longevity of the flash drive, but swap in general is needed and I really really do not want to touch my main boot disk.

4) Is this feasible for a non power-user? I know my way around Unix-like systems, but one of the main reasons I'm doing this is as a learning experience. Hence, I expect to have to learn a lot of stuff, but I want to know if I should attempt this sort of unconventional/strange setup without more experience under my belt.

5) Are the above OSes interesting and different enough to warrant individual investigation? This is a bit of a subjective and personal question, but I do want to try to get both a fair bit of breadth and depth of perspective on the differences, weakness, and strengths of the various OSes out there.

Any tips, tricks, warnings, and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance.

Zygomorph

View Public Profile for Zygomorph

Find all posts by Zygomorph

9 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Solaris

USB flash Drive

Hello all.. I have a Verbatim 2 GB flash drive. I also have Solaris 10 running on my workstation. If I am in the Windows environment, it detects the flash drive. But when I plug it while I am in solaris, nothing happens. How will solaris 10 detect my flash drive? What do I have to do? any...

2. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

USB flash drive is not mounting what to do...?

hello forum.. i am using RHEL 4.0 and my system is dual boot.normally the usb flash drive should be auto mount , but in my system i am unable to mount the drive plz help... i am a new user so plz give me in detail. thank u in advance.

3. SCO

mounting USB floppy drive /Flash drive in OSR 6.0

Can anybody help me out to mount USB flash /floppy drive in sco openserver 6.0 .

4. Ubuntu

Flash drive space issues

Hello, I have a 2 GB RealTek flash drive that has worked well in the past. It's about 1 year old but lately when I plug it into my Ubuntu Intrepid system it only shows 50 MB available even though there are no files on it: $ df -k /media/disk-1 Filesystem 1K-blocks Used...

5. Solaris

removable flash drive

I have a removable usb flash drive which is visible below as no. 2 # rmformat Looking for devices... 1. Volmgt Node: /vol/dev/aliases/cdrom0 Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2 Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/sd@0,0 Connected Device: HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW...

6. Solaris

removable usb flash drive

# rmformat Looking for devices... 1. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0p0 Physical Node: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,1/ide@0/sd@0,0 Connected Device: HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GWA4164B E113 Device Type: DVD Reader/Writer 2. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0 Physical Node:...

7. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Installing Solaris 10 on Flash Drive

Where can I find instructions for doing this? I am running Win XP and would like to be able to run solaris 10 from my flash drive. Thanks, Carrie

8. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Flash drive recovering data.

I have a flash drive which contained very important docs. But somebidy accidently dleted those files. I want to recover these files anyhow. I have listened the Linux have best possible chances of recovering it. Can anybody tell me how to recover that?

9. Red Hat

help regarding installing FEDORA on flash drive

How should i install Fedora onto flash drive .. to boot the OS from flash drive.. plz help me in that!! :(

LEARN ABOUT POSIX

systemd-machine-id-commit.service

SYSTEMD-MACHINE-ID-COMMIT.SERVICE(8)			 systemd-machine-id-commit.service		      SYSTEMD-MACHINE-ID-COMMIT.SERVICE(8)

NAME

       systemd-machine-id-commit.service - Commit a transient machine ID to disk

SYNOPSIS

       systemd-machine-id-commit.service

DESCRIPTION

       systemd-machine-id-commit.service is an early boot service responsible for committing transient /etc/machine-id files to a writable disk
       file system. See machine-id(5) for more information about machine IDs.

       This service is started after local-fs.target in case /etc/machine-id is a mount point of its own (usually from a memory file system such
       as "tmpfs") and /etc is writable. The service will invoke systemd-machine-id-setup --commit, which writes the current transient machine ID
       to disk and unmount the /etc/machine-id file in a race-free manner to ensure that file is always valid and accessible for other processes.
       See systemd-machine-id-setup(1) for details.

       The main use case of this service are systems where /etc/machine-id is read-only and initially not initialized. In this case, the system
       manager will generate a transient machine ID file on a memory file system, and mount it over /etc/machine-id, during the early boot phase.
       This service is then invoked in a later boot phase, as soon as /etc has been remounted writable and the ID may thus be committed to disk to
       make it permanent.

SEE ALSO

       systemd(1), systemd-machine-id-setup(1), machine-id(5), systemd-firstboot(1)

systemd 237												      SYSTEMD-MACHINE-ID-COMMIT.SERVICE(8)