Installing to sda1

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Installing to sda1
started by: Hutchy

Posted by Hutchy on July 31 2005,01:35

Just a bit confused in regards to what dsl regards as installing to USB KEY or pendrive ,External Harddrives etc. Are they mainly talking about installing as it is "like livecd" where you dont have a root partition or do many people actually install it to USB key like a harddrive install .reason I ask is I have not had much success installing other Distros to External harddives etc but would like to.. which is why I thought DSL might of been designed to do but after doing some research it looks as though its mainly for doing a copy of LiveCD. Also then what really are the advantages of doing a Frugal install or this Grub install which type of install is best for a external HardDrive etc I dont quite understand the differences as I think I counted 5 different ways to install DSL . (frugal , Grub,extension, etc,etc)

Posted by fang11 on July 31 2005,02:36

frugal is basically like live cd hdinstall is an actual install and this grub install i'm not sure off i guess it installs dsl with grub which is a boot loader that you need with an hdinstall to get alsa (i'm still running 1.0 need to update >.<) working but i assume if you wanted to install to a usb hard drive or etc like an hdinstall you could run sudo dsl-hdinstall and when it ask for the partition you want to install type sda1 or whatever the corresponding location is

Posted by cbagger01 on July 31 2005,04:12

Exactly.

USB pendrive installs will make a frugal installation on your USB mass storage device. A frugal install is similar to a livecd in that the main filesystem is compressed and read-only.

If your USB drive is actually a HARD DRIVE and not a FLASH MEMORY device, then you can do a normal DSL hd install with sda as your hard drive target.

However, it is a bad idea to do a normal HD install to a flash drive. Why? Because flash memory can only withstand a limited number of disk writes (100,000 or so) before it will fail. This sounds like a big number but when you are using swap and things like logfiles and web browser temporary internet files it is possible to kill a flashdrive in a few months by doing a normal hd install.

For flash memory, the pendrive install is better because the filesystem is read-only like a CD and then use the backup/restore system to save your files upon shutdown. This is much more flash memory friendly.

Posted by Hutchy on July 31 2005,09:30

Thanks, that helps my understanding better, I did a USB-KEY install like LiveCD which is a excellent idea "can Carry it Around" but would like to experiment with External Harddrive as I have lots & lots of space on it. If it works "great" if it doesn't "then To Bad" Life goes On