USB pen-drive partition

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: USB pen-drive partition
started by: crew

Posted by crew on Sep. 05 2005,21:43

Hi all,

might it be big trouble to change the USB pen-drive script, that
it only formats a custom selected area on the pen-drive or only
e.g. 150 MB or 200 MB for DSL ?
Today even 512 MB USB sitcks are cheap and imho it´s a bit
annoying to have a > 512 MB FAT partition which is not writeable
for the DSL user.
Would be nice to boot DSL from USB stick and use it as storage too.

Cheers
Crew

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 06 2005,02:34

It is possible to write to a FAT partition from within DSL.

It is also possible to boot from the USB stick and use it as storage.

Posted by crew on Sep. 06 2005,06:37

Quote (cbagger01 @ Sep. 05 2005,22:34)

It is possible to write to a FAT partition from within DSL.

Hi cbagger01,

how can you write as the DSL User on the stick ?

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....74;st=0 >

Posted by eco2geek on Sep. 06 2005,08:13

Quote

how can you write as the DSL User on the stick ?

I used the USB-ZIP method of creating a bootable USB key. It creates two partitions, one small one (~50MB) for the syslinux and cloop image files, and one that contains the rest of the space available on the key. The script formats them both as FAT16.

The first partition (sda1) is full, and the files there require root access to modify.

The second partition (sda2) is empty, avalable for you to save files to it (e.g. DSL extensions, config backups, documents, etc.).

So, just mount it and have at it. As the dsl user, at a bash prompt:

dsl@dslbox: mount /mnt/sda2

Save your files there. That's all.

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 06 2005,16:10

If you are using DSL version 1.4, you should be able to write to the /cdrom (your FAT partition for a USBHDD installation) from the get-go.

If you type

mount

from within a terminal window, is /cdrom listed as read-only (ro) or read-write (rw)?

Posted by crew on Sep. 06 2005,19:23

That´s right, I´m using DSL 1.4 and the /cdrom is mounted (rw),
but the whole file system is rwxr-xr-x. The DSL user has no write
permission. I´ve no idea how to change that.
When I find a little time I gonna check the USB-ZIP installation,
what eco2geek describes sounds interesting.