Writeable root fs on USB stick

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Writeable root fs on USB stick
started by: Bob489

Posted by Bob489 on June 21 2005,18:01

Hi,

I just came back to DSL from Feather, I have been hearing that the (Feather) distro will no longer be updated.

Anyway... I started this thread to discuss installing a writeable DSL usb pen drive distro.

I do know there are installs for making USB installs that boot up the KNOPPIX cloop image, but none appear to be writeable.

I have looked all over the forum for info reguarding this topic, but can't seem to find anything.

I have found in the script where the KNOPPIX fs image is mounted as cloop.

My first question is, is there another module required to mount a regular writeable loopback file system at boot? (for example... cloop.o is required to mount the KNOPPIX image)

Any feedback would be great.

Thanks,
Bob

Posted by roberts on June 21 2005,18:43

Having a writeable filesystem on a USB device would quickly wear out the device.
I suggest that you try the exiting installation scripts for pendrives, there is very little you cannot do given the DSL/myDSL way of doing things.

Posted by Bob489 on June 21 2005,19:00

I never heard of using a usb pen drive in a way to "wear out the device". Do you mean running out of room on the device? Because it will deff be an issue, I will prob be using a 512 mb or 1gb device to start with. I am not sure what the uncompressed dimensions of the provided KNOPPIX filesystem will be, but I think i can get it to work with a 500mb fs.

Bob

Posted by roberts on June 21 2005,20:30

USB flash drives as well as Compct Flash have limited number of "writes" before failure. Running a live filesystem, or even some extensions that use "disk" cache can quickly lead to this situation. There is even a new filesystem that is being developed to work with these devices. Running read-only compressed filesystem is so much easiler on these devices. Yet we do allow writing of backup files which is far less intense than that of a operating system.

Posted by Bob489 on June 22 2005,00:05

The current sandisk usb drive doesn't support syslinux, so i am using the usb boot floppy to get it to look at the usb drive just till i get my hands on another one.

whenever i boot i get the following

"Accessing DSL Linux at /dev/sda1... cat no file /KNOPPIX/etc/ld.so.cache"

it then goes into a panic

any one ever see this? I have the file system at /dev/sda1/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX

Bob

Posted by anon on June 29 2005,18:55

Bob, I had that problem. Try grabbing an updated boot disk.