(Advanced) Booting Ubuntu installed on HDD from encrypted USB stick or similar
 

Hi there,

For my first post I have a brain teaser. I'm wanting to boot my desktop computer from an USB stick. With either a grub password, or a redundant encryption feature.

Does any of you have experience with this?

All I can find is completely installing linux on USB sticks.

The USB stick contains an EXT3 filesystem and all that I want is GRUB to look for the kernel etc. in /dev/sda1/boot/ which is my SSD. So I guess it will have to mount the drive first. Has any of you found guides to this or similar sort of setups? Because the internet is ruled by noobs, and they all want the same thing.

I remember from my previous education, you can copy the bootsector with the dd command and then copy the kernel etc, and run update-grub, yet the steps are not clear to me..

Any help would be much abliged.

i00

Your grub just needs to know how to read the media, and you can specify any installed disk as the source of the boot files. That grub is loaded from a USB stick is really irrelevant. The kernel and initrd are specified as usual, and the location from which they are loaded is the root media:
There may be some chicanery required to ascertain what media is assigned the the various hd numbers, but that is all just system-specific configuration.

--- rod.

That's what I thought
 

Thank you kind sir.