DSL Embedded :: Boot/qemu writable FS on USB

Forgive me if this is the wrong forum, as what I want to do may not be possible with DSL Embedded.

What I'd like to do is to be able to keep a decent sized usb drive (about half a gig) with an entire file system and DSL installed on it that will be bootable from within Windows using qemu. The catch is, I would like very much to be able to write directly to the USB drive as if I were booting a VM with VMware using raw disk access.

The purpose of this is that I do a lot of "hotdesking". I'm frequently on different desktop PCs with work, and rarely have the option of running linux on them. If I can do the above, it would be easy for me to stay in Windows on the work machines and still have a usable/writable linux desktop wherever I go.

So, is something like this even possible? I look forward to your advice.

You can do this and write to the "Virtual Hard drive" image file that it on your USB drive.

However, if you want to write directly to the USB drive's root directory, this is not easily possible.

My solution is to do this:

1) Install samba.dsl
2) From MSWindows Explorer, add Network sharing to my USB drive letter (E:\ drive)
3) Use LinNeighborhood or the command line program smbmount to mount the Windows network share for the USB drive at mountpoint /mnt/winusb
4) Enjoy

i duno if that can be done, going through qemu and all, but what I do is use samba... cause it works great.. here's a stupid little script i wrote to mount drives (including usb drives)

Code Sample

#!/bin/sh
#
# mountdrive <ip> <driveletter> <username> <passwd>

sudo mkdir /mnt/$2
sudo smbmount //$1/$2\$ /mnt/$2 -ousername=$3,password=$4,uid=dsl

to mount e$ on ur machine as nt user/pass to /mnt/e

Code Sample

mountdrive 192.168.0.5 e user pass

it at least gives you r/w access through smb protocol.

forgot to mention as cbagger wrote,
you would need to install samba.dsl
or remaster with that package installed (which is what i did)

Thanks guys, I'll give this a shot.

Is there some piece of logic I'm missing as to why it isn't easy to give qemu raw access to a USB drive, install DSL onto it, and then write changes/installs directly to the drive from within Windows? I know it's not really a good comparison, but I can do precisely this with something like VMware. I was just hoping to do it with a little less overhead using qemu.

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