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

[Dieter Plaetinck]

On Tue, 3 Aug 2010 10:43:03 +0300
jesse jaara <jesse.jaara at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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

check out http://larch.berlios.de/, I think that tool is written for
just this use case.

Dieter