a quandry involving usb only install of slackware 10,2
 

Hi,

I'm working on a project and was wondering if anyone could help.

I'm trying to install Slackware 10.2 on to a 1gb flash drive (to small i know, but thats not the problem) I used Fdisk to partition the usb drive into a linux partition with a swap partition (swap being 258mb regular partition being 750mb) and it succfucly writes to the drive making the partitions, However when i go into setup it reconizies the drive as formated as fat16. Is there a way to format the Usb device to ect2 with out using setup?

(also i was thinking of using a seprate 256mb flash drive as the swap to free up that space on the 1gb flash drive)

Thanks in advance for your help,

CheeseMonger

I take it you are running a linux system, it doesn't say in your profile.

From the command line, with your USB drive plugged in, but not mounted, and as root.

This assumes that the 750mb partition is the first on the drive.

Read the man page for formatting options.

Samac

Thanks for the Reply Samac
Sorry about the profile distro thing(i need to get on that).

I think i didnt give you enough info...

What im trying to do is install Slackware 10.2 on a Usb flash drive without using a hard drive or other computer; just a mother board, a 1gb usb flash drive, cdrom drive, and floppy disk drive. I dont want to use an Hard drive because of the nature of the project im working on.

I dont know if the mobo specs will help but here they are anyway,

Compaq deskpro EP series P600
Pentium 3 600mhz
256mb ram
L1 cache 128kb
100mhz bus speed
onboard graphics and sound
added USB 2.0 pci card
2 usb 1.0 ports (onboard)
230w power supply (posibly stepped down to 90 in finished project)

Flash Drive is a PNY 1GB attache
Extra (posible swap) flash drive is a 256mb PNY attache

Hope some of that info will help.

CheeseMonger

When you run setup it is from the command line of the installer, try running mke2fs /dev/sda1 before you run setup.

I do not know if this will work because I do not know if mke2fs is included in the boot.

samac

It worked....sorta....
 

....I had to change /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda for what ever reason...weird. After that tho the mke2fs command worked! :)

now the install reconizes the usb as formated for linux, Thanks a lot!

Ill post here again when i get slackware 10.2 running on the machine. :)

thanks again,
CheeseMonger

And, just as a side note, swap on a flash drive is quite a bad idea. Swap is constantly changing (it's effectively slow RAM) and Flash drives really don't take kindly to the same files changing an awful lot, not even those with the technology to cope with it.

This is a sure way to kill your Flash drive. Omit the swap altogether. Unless you've got less than about 512Mb RAM in the machines you are running it, you can live without swap at all.