ReiserFS or ext3 on USB flash drive?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 11:10:58AM -0500, bassix-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> I would like to know if this is possible:
> 
> 1) Installed distro on hard drive (size around 1.5GB).

Sounds perfectly doable.

> 2) Format a 2GB USB 2.0 FLASH drive with ReiserFS or ext3.

Make sure you mount without sync, which some distributions tend to do.
noatime is also recomended.

> 3) Completely move the hard drive installed distro to the USB FLASH
> drive (which would be bootable). I've seen instructions for moving
> installed OS to another partition, so I assume the same instructions
> would work.

Well cp -ax / /newroot or something similar will at least take care of
some of it.  Fixing the boot loader, initrd, etc is another task.

> Has anyone ever done this? Will it work? I'm hoping to create a
> "customized" distro install that I can take and plug into different
> machines. I'd like to have a real OS as opposed to a live cd so that I
> can still update and upgrade.

I imagine someone has done something like it.

> Is this feasible? Does anyone know of any potential pitfalls from trying this?

Differing hardware will be entertaining.  You need something to load all
the usb drivers, possibly picking the right one based on what type of
usb controller the host has, from initrd, so that you can then mount the
filesystem.

If you want X, you have to deal with X configuration, mouse type and
port, etc.

Maybe a knoppix install on a usb card would solve a lot of that since it
already does a lot of work to deal with hardware detection.  Much of
what you are likely to need is what the live distributions already do.

> Any help would be appreciated as always.

Len Sorensen
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