Comments on: Installing Linux on USB – Part 5: Installing Debian Linux on USB flash memory drives

By: firefox2501

firefox2501 — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:49:00 +0000

Yes, compact flash drives are typically recognized as standard hard drives. But they are more similar to USB flash drives, as they also have a limited number of writes.

By: firefox2501

firefox2501 — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:41:24 +0000

A lot of this article focuses on reducing the number of writes to the flash drive. And you did that very well.

However, according to the fstab snippet you posted, you still have the swap partition on the flash drive. This can also generate a lot of writes to the flash.

Options to get around putting the swap partition on the flash:
1) You can install without a swap partition, however, that may cause problems down the road, and that would require manually partitioning the drive.
2) You can install the swap partition on another drive, preferably a hard drive, not a flash. But once again, this requires manually partitioning the drive.

Anyone have other thoughts on how to get around excessive writes for the swap partition?

By: Raed

Raed — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:37:34 +0000

“Now once you are finish installing Debian and installing GRUB to your MBR reboot your system and boot from your USB flash drive”
In the above lines i would suggest to clarify the procedure more. Since installing GRUB should be on the USB not on the HDD MBR. because if you installed on the HDD you will not be able to boot your original PC’s OS unless USB is plugged.
So all what you have to do is click “NO” when the installer asks about installing GRUB, and on the following page you will be able to specify USBs path for installation directory i.e. /dev/sdb1 (in my case).
I believe this hints will avoid users to have problems as i had when going through your nice tutorial.

By: Admin

Admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:11:07 +0000

That depends. Usually Compact Flash are detected as regular hard drives so they won’t require any special treatment. If they are not then I don’t see why anybody cannot use the same steps as mentioned in Part 5. So go ahead and try it.

By: Raed

Raed — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:40:37 +0000

Very nice tutorial..
I am wondering if it is ok to do the same steps(Part5) for CompactFlash?

By: Review: Installing Linux on USB flash drives and USB hard drives | Organizing Linux Information!

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:23:42 +0000

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By: Admin

Admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:49:47 +0000

Thank you for your comment!

You can also subscribe to my blog site here:
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By: machiner

machiner — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:25:14 +0000

Smokin’ tutorial.

By: Kushal

Kushal — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 01:08:43 +0000

Hello Shake,
Thank you for your comment! Always nice to hear back from visitors.
Yes, I think I know the reason. Is your hdd detected as /dev/sd*
If yes, then this is a pretty obvious and annoying scenario…
What does your GRUB first option contains? root=/dev/sda I am guessing….Now when you connect your HDD and are trying to boot from USB try passing root=/dev/sdb and see if you can get your system to boot. Once can switch to using UUIDs instead of /dev/sd* naming scheme to solve this problem.
Please report back if this solves your problem.

By: shake

shake — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:38:54 +0000

If I disconnect my hdd while installing onto the flash drive it doesn’t really work. After booting into GRUB after the install with hdd connected again and selecting the first option to boot, it tries booting from the hdd instead of the flash drive (although GRUB did start from flash drive). However with hdd disconnected it works just fine.

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