O.K. I have an OLD laptop with a burnt out HD so I figured I could use it to boot off USB drives for different linux flavors on top of my other one that is dual boot Ubuntu and Win 10

My question is, and I know Kali Live doesn't save data so I'm running it on 16 GB USB drive, but ...

I have read that Linux USB disks need to be formatted with FAT32, at least for UNetBootin. Im sure there are other ways, but I am familiar with UNetBootin.

So that means the largest USB drive I can make is 32 GB on a USB stick. I would like to use at least 64 GB for each Distro I put on USB

Is it possible to install NTFS and run linux off of it using NTFS ? From what i remember and what I have read largest FAT32 is 32 GB

Wondering this before I order a half dozen USB sticks

P.S. I want to save modifications, updates, file downloads, bookmarks, etc on the USB sticks - except Kali of course

Some distro's can be installed onto the USB drive so that as long as your laptop supports it, you can boot to the USB and run a full distribution exactly like it was installed to an internal drive. Depending on how old, your laptop may or may not support that.

Course, you can usually pick up new drives of the ~120-150 GB size for chump change on ebay now, so you could always also use normal live distros, format the internal drive and use it for persistence for the ones that support that also.

I understand that. I could also boot off of a CD Drive if I really want to

However I want to boot strictly off USB sticks, and yes the computer that has the bad HD does support USB booting. It's solid there.

I'm just wondering, because the internal drive is cooked - and I don't care to replace it I want to run off USB only not external drives.


A) Is there any alternative on USB stick formatting too run Linux Distros and save procress without formatting FAT32 ? For larger drives (USB Only) .... There doesn't seem to be on UnetBootin. I get errors when booting. I think 64 GB would be fine more most Distros as I just want to get tastes for them and flip flop, not run one steadily.

B) I do not want to partition one external drive, even a 1 TB or 500 GB drive. I have issues installing 3 Linux distros as a beginner let a lone 5 or 6

Thank you for the help btw

You can partition and format removable media in all kinds of different file systems. For a workable Linux filesystem, the best is to format in EXT2 (an older, non jounalized file system) or EXT4 (the most common default, journalized file system), however, others may argue this point (everyone has their favorites). I haven't really booted from removable USB media, except to try out Chromium OS, so I can't really answer about UNetBootin...

No. NTFS doesn't support POSIX permissions. You could TRY it,... But even if you managed to get it to work, it wouldn't work well.

There are some live distro's that support persistence on their media (such as puppy). However, I can't be of much help, because I use only dd for writing usb drives, I won't use unetbootin myself, doubly since it's been removed from debians repos other than sid. Good luck though!

OK, Thanks Guys ...

I'll try EXT2 on a 16 GB drive that won't load Kali Live on anything but FAT32 and see what happens for starters.

Anyone with more information I would REALLY appreciate it ...

BTW what is max EXT2 Disk Size to Format ?

EXT2 max volume size is 32 TiB,... Big enough for you...

TB u mean ? Like TeraBytes ? Damn ! That will work !

Do u know I'f it boots from unetbootin or alternative source ?

If so, I'm set ... Thanks !

Why not just install your choice of distro onto your pendrives(?).

They will act just the same as an internal hard drive, except that access will be a little bit slower.
(I regularly do, & I use ext4, no problem.)

I thought Pen Drives were USB sticks ?

If they are external HDD I don't want to go that way ... Access time aside, must preference

If I cared about access time that much Imwould buy a SSD and partition it correctly. USB read/write times of 300 Mbps is fine by me

Yep, same thing, (also called thumb drives by some).

What I was trying to convey is that you can just install any distro to a pendrive, just like to an internal hard drive.
If you use a 'live' system on a pendrive, you then have the problem of having to create & set up persistence so that you can save your settings & files.

Thanks !

Kali I see the reason to run Live ...

But on other distros do you have to run Live on USB or can you do fill installs to the drives ?

I'd like to do full installs obviously to save files, updates, modifications, bookmarks, etc ...

The 32GB limit for FAT32 partitions is an artificial one that windows imposes on itself. You can format it larger than 32GB as FAT32 under linux and that's nothing new. But you don't need to unless you're doing some sort of UEFI setup, which you probably are NOT on older hardware.

Just think of usb sticks as harddrives. Although they tend to be horridly slow, so I tend to use a USB card reader and an SDHC card. But not all readers are bootable, so YMMV. And SDHC cards have limited writes so expect them to fail at least once a year in a mostly unrecoverable way. I also have a couple USB HDDs for when I want to run an external linux install for a longer duration. Otherwise all the usual install methods apply. One advantage of external drives is that you can do installs on OTHER machines, and then boot them on the destination machine.

The only caveat I can think of is if your machine is old enough (pre-2006) to not support booting USB at all. Although you can chainload the grub on the USB device from a CDROM grub disc if that's the case. Many means to an end.

There are two ways to install Linux on a USB drive (be it a thumb/flash/pen drive or an external usb hard drive).

1) Use dd, unetbootin, YUMI, or some other tool to write a live ISO to the drive.

2) Use a separate boot device to run a linux installer to actually install linux to the drive.

#1 is easier and faster, but very limited. You usually don't get persistence, and even when you do it's easily corrupted, filesystem types are often limited, etc.

#2 gets you a full linux installation with a regular filesystem, but it means you need a separate boot drive and you need to run through the linux installation process, which takes time and knowledge to not screw things up. #2 actually requires #1 as well. You use #1 to write the installation dvd to USB drive A, boot that, then use the installer to install linux onto USB drive B.

I'm not sure what you mean. The USB stick is only slow if you purchase a crappy slow one. Same goes for SDHC cards. There are plenty of USB sticks that have upwards of 200 MB/s read/write speeds. I have two sitting on my desk right now. Of course you won't get those speeds on a USB 2.0 port, but you won't get any faster than 40 MB/s with an SDHC card and USB reader either on a USB 2.0 port.