13 Oct
2023
13 Oct
'23
2:45 p.m.
On Friday 13 October 2023 14:11:29 deloptes via tde-users wrote:
William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Yes, they are not so expensive, but I dislike shopping online except when it
cannot be avoided, and making a trip to the local computer shop is not very
convenient here. But I do foresee this is my near future, as I need to get
some more flash drives.
Regarding the efi partition: the one on my installed system, for the internal
hard drive in my laptop, is only 60 mb. It is not a matter to how big, but
rather whether I would use an entire flash drive (however small, say 8 or 10
gb) for only 60 mb. I don't usually see flash drives smaller than that
nowadays. However, if I can partition a flash drive like a small portable
system (which I have done before with a 64 gb flash drive, and put the efi
partition on that, as well, then use this efi partition on the flash drive to
boot my system even if using the OS installed on my actual machine, not the
OS installed on my flash drive, then it would not be a complete waste of a
flash drive.
I hope this is clear, what I intend to say. And it is always convenient to be
able to carry around an complete OS in my pocket, to be able to boot any
machine, in an emergency, from that flash drive, and to use the hardware only
a kind of temporary host. I did experiment with running my entire system from
a flash drive, and using my machine's hard drive merely as temporary storage
(keeping everything else on external hard drives), and actually, this worked
pretty well, if just a little slow. But in the long run it did not work,
because I think it was too much stress on the flash drive itself, which
eventually got corrupted and became unusable.
To keep an OS (with all those partitons) on a flash drive just for emergency
use, or sometime use when I am using another machine as a temporary host:
that isn't a bad idea, though. I am just wondering, Can I use an efi
partition -- installed on such a flash drive -- independently of the OS on
that flash drive; in other words, to use that efi partition to boot the OS
installed on my actual machine? To install a boot partition to an external
source, such as a flash drive, is one of the installation options I get with
Devuan, but I haven't tried this yet.
Thanks for your help.
Bill
That's not a bad idea. I have actually
installed a complete system on a
USB stick before; not only the root partition, but also swap and home.
And I have been considering putting the efi boot partition on a flash
drive, except that I need to get a few more flash drives before I can
waste one for such a small partition. Unless it can be put there along
side a Linux installation, then boot either from the machine's OS or from
the one installed on the USB stick? That sounds like it could work, or
not.
I do installation on USB via debootstrap and chroot.
Also I do not understand what you mean by EFI small partition. There are
pen drives (4GB) starting at 4€ in the local shop. EFI can be real small -
128 or 256MB. But the system goes onto the other partitions. After
configuring properly and executing update-grub it finds your Windows
partitions and write the entries intothe grub config. After this you can
boot into any OS that was present when you executed update-grub. If you
remove the USB stick - you boot directly to Windows.
BR