Linux - Hard Installation to USB Jump Drive
 

I know there are distriubtions like puppy, and DSL linux that will allow u to place their OS onto a USB jump drive. the problem is that when u do it acts like a live cd and isn't static. I want to place a linux distribution onto a USB jump drive that I can work on and have it act just like a real hard drive. I want things to be saved to it and be able to use it just like I was using a hard drive which had a linux distribution on it that was static and didn't erase you settings/work upon reboot. I also need to boot to this USB from a floppy drive. My main use for this will be a print server using CUPS to a dell 1700 laserjet printer.

Which distro. would work best for this

thanks

Well, any distro should work like this, so long as you can make it fit on a flash drive. So, use a real distro - not a live CD based one like puppy. Just pick a distro you like and install it onto the USB, just don't install grub or lilo. Then install the bootloader of your choice onto the floppy.

It is possible to configure the flash drive to store settings. Flash drives have a limited number of write/erase cycles (~1,000,000 using some smart logic). You will wear out the drive quickly if you want to spool print jobs to the drive or have a swap partition.

so I loaded grub onto a floppy but I'm curious, what device is my USB drive detected as? It's not a hard disk. I've tried using the command root (hd0,1) to boot to my USB drive but it just says that it doesn't exist. which command would be used in grub to boot off the USB drive and access it?

Good point, I never tried using grub on a usb, but my guess would be (sd0,1). I think the only difference between the way udev names device nodes and the way grub names partitions is that the numbers start at 0 in grub. So, try (sd0,1)

Hmmm... I'm wondering if at this point it is possible to boot the USB drive using grub off of a plain floppy disc. I've looked at some of the other distros like dsl and seen how you can make a usb boot floppy that will boot your usb drive and it seems that they load up a miniimage that contains the USB modules which can then properly give control to the USB device. They also use syslinux (not sure if this matters at all). I also found this article which I am looking through that only has the concepts for what I want to accomplish.

http://linuxgazette.net/116/okopnik1.html