Booting USB from GRUB ?
 

Hi everyone... first time here..:)

Im on the noob side, i use Ubuntu and an IPCOP firewall box.

Im trying to get rid of the noisy hard drive on the IPCOP machine and install the system into an USB pen drive.

This machine is an old HP pentium 3 with 256mb of ram. So it does not have the feature of booting from USB drives.

I can not find documentation about installing the firewall into a USB drive. There is one for CF cards but it wont work for me.

So my idea is to copy all the HD partitions with the IPCOP system files and stuff, to a pen drive, and then create a CD that will load GRUB and then have grub load the system located in the pen drive instead of a HD.

I dont know if this is possible because i have no clue about GRUB being able to load USB drivers first to be able to find the system files... or may be this is not even right or the way it works and im just trying to invent something new?

Im completely lost.

so to summarize what i want to do...:

1- have a machine with CDROM and a USB stick drive, and remove the hard drive. (no more noise)
2- Copy the contents of the HD to the USB stick
3- Create a cd to load GRUB.
4- Have a default line in the GRUB menu that will take care of the USB drive and finally load the OS, in this case IPCOP.


Thanks a lot.. for any input.

Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for the dubious advantage of "no more noise", since the CD-ROM drive is certainly going to be making noise and spinning about.

Have you considered getting an IDE-to-CF adapter? They cost about $20 and allow you to drop in a CF card as a replacement for a HDD. No moving parts, no noise, and best yet, no need to worry about getting software to work with it since the system sees it as a totally normal HDD.

You do need to watch out with repetitive writes to the flash, but you would have to do that on the USB drive as well. With a firewall, I can't imagine it would be much of a problem to mount the most of the system read-only after your system is configured properly.

Plus it sounds like they already have a version of the OS setup for such an adapter with the CF version.

I just checked on ebay and those adapters are 5 bucks a piece shipping included..

I didn't know they existed though ...

MS3FGX you are great and right! Thanks a lot man. I'll take the CF route.
See ya in another thread..
Good luck :)