On Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:42:56 -0500 Mark Filipak <markfilipak.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2013/3/1 3:29 PM, Go Linux wrote: > > > Duh . . . How about installing on an external hard drive? > > That would be nice, but that would be on USB also... > And if the computer's hardware can deal with USB hard drives, and anything recent can, there is no problem. Any OS will treat it like any other hard drive. Windows will make use of the BIOS, Linux will drive it directly. USB *sticks* can have problems. They normally come as a single partition i.e. with no partition table, and this will freak out anything that expects one. I have trouble mounting and dismounting *some* USB sticks on my Sid installation. I've had to reformat a few to make them usable. I don't think the whole-drive format is as well standardised as the normal multi-partition arrangement. It is possible to make a normal partition table, but they don't come like that. The one I carry around has ext3 and FAT32 partitions, and I don't really mind that Windows machines can only see the second. But given the write speed of most flash memory, a USB hard drive will give much better performance, as well as much more space, and you don't need to worry about wear optimisation or limiting. I've mentioned that I have a Sid USB hard drive installation which boots on every normal PC I've tried it with. Install what you like, configure what you like, it's just a normal hard drive installation. You install it as you would any hard drive installation: boot from an installation ISO medium, normally CD, and tell the installer which drive you want to use. The usual method with Debian is to use the network installation ISO, which is very small, and then to add software from the Net. That way you don't get unnecessary stuff. If you don't want Stable, then you switch repositories and do a dist-upgrade of the original Net installation, as there's not much there to upgrade, and it saves downloading or copying a lot of Stable and then throwing it away. Installation uses the physical hardware of the host machine, but not its OS. I installed 32-bit Debian on the drive while it was attached to my 64-bit workstation. You may want to tidy up /etc/fstab afterwards, as it will also contain all the host's partitions. Unstable can be a bit tricky at times, and needs a lot of updating as it's a rolling distribution, but I've only needed to reinstall twice in about eight years of running it. I use an Unstable workstation, so I pretty well copied it to the USB drive, using dpkg --get-selections. Using Unison to synchronise data, given that most places I go have a PC I can borrow, I effectively have a laptop that fits in a small pocket but uses a big monitor, and has a much faster big brother at home. That really does look like the sort of thing you want. And yes, this mucking about with USB sticks and external hard drives is a bit more complicated than a Windows installation, but then you can't do this kind of thing with Windows *at* *all*. You can install Windows to an internal hard drive *from* a USB stick, and some recent server versions come as ISOs which don't fit on optical media so this is necessary, but you can't install *to* a removable drive. Windows will not boot if the hardware around it changes more than slightly, it is necessary to re-register it with Microsoft, and it's up to Microsoft whether to permit it. -- Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130302011042.6ea51...@jretrading.com
