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Ubuntu 7.10 With Persistence... On a Flash Drive!

Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 6:00 pm
by Chalks
Materials:
1 Ubuntu 7.10 live CD .ISO
1 Flash Drive 1Gb (2Gb recommended)
10-20 min (once you have the live cd in hand)

Guide:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/09/28 ... n-install/

About two weeks ago, a friend's laptop running windows vista exploded (not literally, mind you). A critical file had become corrupted. It was obviously an easy fix, all that was needed would be to boot from an Ubuntu live cd, and replace the file. I went home to create the live cd, and after I did I was disappointed. The CD takes _forever_ to boot from, and is annoyingly loud (thanks in part to my ancient dvd/rom drive). So I thought, hmm... why not boot from a flash drive, wouldn't that be awesome? I then spent the next week trying to get linux on my flash drive. By time I finally figured it out, my friend had fixed his computer on his own (huzzah for reinstalling windows).

The biggest problem I had was trying to do this from a windows environment. I'm not nerdy enough to have a pc dedicated to linux (yet), so I was having quite a bit of difficulty finding a way to partition a flash drive into two partitions while in windows. I'm pretty much convinced it's impossible to do for free. Then, I stumbled upon the guide above. The guide worked almost perfectly. In fact, everything except for step #20 worked perfectly. Step 20 threw me a curveball simply because I didn't realize there was a space inbetween ' /media/ubuntu710/' and 'U710fix.zip'.


I've been playing around with my new flash drive for about 20 minutes now. Here are some comments:
  • Can not boot from drive IF plugged into a usb hub.

    With my old motherboard, I have to change the first hard drive to my 2gb flash drive before it shows up in boot order options.

    Boot time is pretty slow (slower than windows xp). Once booted though, runs like a dream (a nice dream).
edit: I thought part of my problem with using it on my desktop computer was using a usb hub... untrue! The problem was my bios had a floppy drive enabled, and I didn't actually have a floppy drive installed. Once disabled, booted just fine.

Re: Ubuntu 7.10 With Persistence... On a Flash Drive!

Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 11:30 pm
by Kieran Huggins
is it restricted to a single hardware profile? if not it could be hella useful, especially with the price of current USB drives...

Re: Ubuntu 7.10 With Persistence... On a Flash Drive!

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2008 8:24 am
by Chalks
I'm _brand_ new to linux, so I have no idea. If you tell me how to check, I'll find out for you. :)

Edit: When you say "hardware profile", do you mean the internal setup/hardware of the box you plug it into? If so, I'll check when I go home today. Thus far, I've only used it in one computer.

Edit2: Ok. Messed around with this for a little while, and made a bit of progress. So far, it has worked on every computer I've tried it on (urm... 2 computers). One computer, a dell laptop less than a year old running vista booted off the flash drive in about 40 seconds (maybe a bit more? I didn't time it). It recognized the wireless card instantly, and the cd/dvd rom. However, I didn't think to mount the hard drive (more on this later). The second computer (mine) did not boot right away. I had to disable to floppy drive in bios before it would work. Once I figured that out, booted just fine at about the same speed. However, I have yet to get it to recognize the linksys wireless card. Also, I can't mount any of my internal hard drives.

The former issue I think I've found a solution for, but I haven't implemented it yet... no time.

The latter issue I have an idea about, but it'll take more research. The gist of it is that I don't think it's properly reading the ntfs file system. I was getting an error similar to this guy. Apparently, I need to install a library and sacrifice a couple goats to Linus Torvalds.

Once those two issues are resolved (and thanks to persistence, they'll stay resolved!) and I've tested it on several more computers, I'll load this nifty little thing to see if it improves the boot speed.

Re: Ubuntu 7.10 With Persistence... On a Flash Drive!

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 11:24 am
by anto91
Kieran Huggins wrote:is it restricted to a single hardware profile? if not it could be hella useful, especially with the price of current USB drives...
Its not restritected to a single hardware profile, i have an old 80gb hardisk that i have a simple copy of ubuntu on that i use when ever my brother or sister crashes there computer i just put it in the computer and copy of the "important" files they have and reinstall.

Im sure that installing ubuntu on a usb would workout fine