Booting from HD but keeping it Read Only

learningMan · 03-23-2007, 07:54 PM

Hi,
I have Flash HD for booting my linux system. The problem is to preserve the life time of the flash disk as much as possible, so I've been thinking in make it Read Only. Maybe a Live Distro should be a good solution but I need to install somo special librarys and I would like to do this with Fedora or SuSE.

Any idea?

Thank you in advance

nflenz · 03-23-2007, 08:50 PM

Add the 'ro' option to your /etc/fstab.

learningMan · 03-23-2007, 09:02 PM

...fstab "ro" is OK, but, what about swaping? ... maybe add a RAM disk should be a good idea too

nflenz · 03-23-2007, 09:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by learningMan

...fstab "ro" is OK, but, what about swaping? ... maybe add a RAM disk should be a good idea too

If you're on a computer with a swap partition, use the addswap command to use it, but don't put one on the flash drive.

I prefer to use tmpfs instead of ramdisks. It's similar, but it's size is dynamic.

Code:

#Add this to /etc/fstab
none   /tmp   tmpfs   mode=777   0 0

If you ever find yourself low on RAM, just remove some files in /tmp.

learningMan · 03-24-2007, 09:05 AM

I did not tell you that my system has only one disk, the flash HD that we are talking about. That's why I'm trying to ensure not to write anything on it (I'm afraid of the flash degradation if I use it as a common HD) because the system should asure a long lifetime...

then, to sum up, should be

a/ "fstab ro" and

b/ disabling the swaping

enougth to solve, this?

Thanks for your patience.