Running Linux from USB drive
 

Hi I have tried in the past to create a USB thumbdrive 8 gb linux.
Now I got one 64 gb thumbdrive to use it to install linux. So that I will not need to use the pc's harddisk but just use my thumbdrive to install my gaming and other personal software.

I tried using the pen drive to make it bootable, but the persistent only max at 4gb and the . Is the anyway i can increase the capacity.

How do I create this pen USB and use it like a pc with 64Gb of hdd space.

I use mint linux this round, but it is so different from Ubuntu I used a year ago. The software manager did not work, I was not able to install anything from it.

I do however able to install wine thru another software packages.

I am using my office laptop t400 Lenovo core 2 duo to create mt thumbdrive Linux.

Pls let me know what distro to use best and how about doing so

Thx

Benson

Hi, welcome to LQ!.
Mint uses Synaptic, it downloads, resolves dependencies and installs by way of clicking and internet connection. Go to Menu -> System -> Synaptic. Only be sure you are online, you will have probably hundreds of sofware to install from the repositories.


Decision is purely personal. Visit www.distrowatch.com and browse over choices of distros that can be installed via usb.

HOpe that helps.

Good luck.

Just connect your USB drive, partition it and format with any file system you want (you may want ext2) and install any distro you want like on a HDD.
You have to pay attention to GRUB installation, to put it on USB, not on your internal HDD.

I have got a 16GB USB stick with 5GB system partition ("/") and 11GB /home partition. When I'm on my computer, I just boot the system from HDD and mount my /home from USB, when I'am at another computer, I can boot the machine from USB. Do not put swap on USB stick.

I have two warnings for you:
1. Flash memory has large, but limited number of write/erase cycles possible. USB sticks do not have advanced techniques used in SSD drives to make their life longer.
2. The performance of flash disk formatted with ext3 is much worse than formatted with FAT32.

Treat the usb just as if it were a conventional hard drive. Disable your current internal hard drives or use a virtual machine. Use your distro's installer to install to the usb. Don't use pendrivelinux type of installs for this. They will not work for kernel updates and other updates.

Many live USB distributions use FAT32. Since persistent memory uses a casper-rw file which due to the FAT32 file system is limited to 4G. It is possible to add space to the casper-rw file:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-...per-partition/

As stated you do not have to install a live version but it might reduce the drives life span.