[TriLUG] booting off usbstick

Sat Jul 11 01:58:43 EDT 2020

I may be doing something similar to what Joe is trying to do: I'm
running CentOS 8 from an (external) USB stick, with the four drive bays
devoted to providing NFS (stripe accros mirrors; (tested) spare drive in
a desk drawer.  What's different is that I planned the system this way:
I installed CentOS from a DVD with none of the disk drives installed,
just the USB, and CentOS had no choice but to install on the USB.  It
boots fine.  When I added the disk drives later, they were recognized,
and I could configure them as I intended.

As to performance, once the OS gets loaded from USB, just about the only
access to the USB is to write log files.  There's plenty of RAM to cache
the OS file system, and to cache writes while they're waiting to get
written.  In my setup, the rate of writes to the USB is far less than
its bandwidth, so I'm having no performance trouble there.

    - Stephen

On 7/10/20 11:12 PM, via TriLUG wrote:
> Joe,
> Might you have trunk the install ISO rather than *installing* ubuntu?
> 
> Think twice about ruining from usb
>  It will be slower. Xubuntu uses less than about 20Gb of disk space.
> 
> -- Roger Broseus
> Pls excuse auto-correction induzed tiepos.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Mainguy via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
> To: Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net>, Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion <trilug at trilug.org>
> Sent: Fri, 10 Jul 2020 11:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] booting off usbstick
> 
> the grub.conf might have the hardware id of old sata disks, you would need
> to change that i think.
> 
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 5:13 PM Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 10 Jul 2020, Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG wrote:
>>
>>> I want to boot off a usb stick on a usb connector internal to a
>> computer, so
>>> I
>>> can use all the drive bays for storage.
>>>
>>> o I can boot off a live usb stick attached to the internal connector
>>>
>>> o I can boot off a SATA drive in the drive bay. This has the files that
>> I
>>> want
>>> to boot off in the final configuration.
>>>
>>> o if I dd the content of the SATA drive to the same usb stick that boots
>> the
>>> live file system, and have no other disks in the system, the booting
>> starts
>>> and
>>> gets as far as what seems to be loading the SATA drivers, and then
>> crashes
>>> (the
>>> screen fills with what looks to be a dump of the crash).
>>
>> o if I connect the SATA drive through a SATA to USB converter, the boot
>> crashes
>> in the same way.
>>
>> Joe
>>
>>>
>>> I expected the files that boot off the SATA disk to boot just the same
>> way
>>> when
>>> on a usb stick.
>>>
>>> I've looked around the internet to see what the problem might be without
>>> success.
>>>
>>> I note that all the bootable usb sticks seem to be live filesystems with
>> root
>>> pivots and squashfs, all of which is beyond me. There aren't any
>> webpages
>>> saying
>>> "here's how to take your current setup and use it to boot off a usb
>> stick".
>>>
>>> I expect the usb stick might have a different bios name (instead of sda,
>> it
>>> could be sdb...). However I expect this won't be a problem till the
>> kernel
>>> tries
>>> to mount /, in which case I'm expecting an error like "can't mount
>> /dev/sdx
>>> on /".
>>> But I don't get that. Just for the hell of it, in grub I told it that
>> root
>>> was
>>> sda, then sdb ... but they all crashed the same way.
>>>
>>> I don't know where to go from here. I'd be glad of any suggestions.
>>>
>>> Thanks Joe
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
>> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
>> map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
>> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
>> --
>> This message was sent to: Jonathan Mainguy <jon at jmainguy.com>
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