[arch-general] Image my installed Arch into a USB pendrive

[jesse jaara]

2010/8/3 Martín Cigorraga <martosurf7600 at gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> is possible to image my current Arch system into a USB pendrive and use it
> from there?
> Many thanks!
>
> Martín
>

It is possible you will have to reformat your pendrive to use filesystem
other than fat, using the journaling filesystems will wearout the pen
drive fast so ext2 or pisssibly ?nilfs2? are the ones to go whit.
Also you shouldn't use any swap in usb sticks as it will also wear it out
, I assume that you alredy know that ubs sticks are much slower than hds.
But here is what have to do:

1. sudo mkfs -t ext2_or_some_other_fs /dev/sdx1
2. sudo mount /dev/sdx1 /mnt
3. sudo cp -a /{bin,boot.etc.home,lib,media,opt,root,sbin,srv,usr,var} /mnt/
4. edit the /mnt/etc/fstab and /mnt/grub/menu.lst to use the new root
partion /dev/sdx1
    you SHOULD use uuids instead of the devise names
5. sudo grub-install /dev/sdx
6. sudo mkdir /mnt/{dev,sys,proc}
7. sudo mknod -m600 /mnt/dev/console c 5 1
    sudo mknod -m644 /mnt/dev/null c 1 3
    sudo mknod -m644 /mnt/dev/zero c 1 5

and now you should be redy to boot off