using only USB harddisks ?

Peter L. Peres plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org
Thu Jul 22 04:00:35 UTC 2004


On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 03:44:39PM -0400, William Park wrote:
>> Anyone using USB harddisk?  I'm interested whether one could skip IDE
>> and go USB for all harddisks.  I don't see any way to boot from USB on
>> my BIOS... perhaps, newer motherboard has that option.
>
> Many newer boards do have that feature, although many OSs would be upset
> if you were to unplug their main filesystem, making USB a bit more
> "hazardous" to the system.  I guess with the number of USB ports around
> on modern machines, it's no big deal, and you would of course want a
> USB2 sustem for it, since 1.x is just way too slow.

There is no real hazard since linux boots ro by default and then tries to 
remount rw. knoppix etc use this as you know. So there is no problem to 
boot from a write protected disk-on-key and run with root in ramdisk. 
Speed is ram speed (booting is reasonably fast unless you use something 
really huge, like kde). You can also use two keys one ro with the system 
and one rw for data.

I have never actually seen a firewire storeage device boot a board but I 
heard it can be done.

Peter
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