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

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 03.08.2010 09:43, schrieb jesse jaara:
> 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.

The costs of USB drives are so low that wearing one out isn't a big
problem. Still, if you really don't want a journal, create ext4 without
a journal - ext2 is ancient and much slower than ext4.

> 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/

cp -ax /* is shorter

> 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

These things fail a lot with grub sadly, I recommend syslinux.

> 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

You want to add usb support to mkinitcpio if you actually want to boot this.

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