Re: Quick and dirty "debian live" on USB stick.

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 08:59:21PM EST, Rob Owens wrote:
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 05:19:56PM -0500, Chris Jones wrote:

I'm playing with the idea of copying my laptop's debian lenny
partition to a USB stick that I can take with me when traveling.

Since I can't be sure I'll have a machine with available space on
the HDD or be allowed to partition the drive, what I thought was
that I could have a bootable system on the USB stick and boot into
it pretty much as I would off of a live CD.

[..]

I'm not sure that what you're planning won't work, but if I were you
I'd do it like this:

Create a live USB system (see my instructions in the "live cd/usb
projects" thread). Install all the same software as your current
laptop ha. Then transfer over your data.

What I had in mind was more like a "bootable backup". I tried Debian
Live before and it does not do that.

IIRC, ubuntu has something that does this, but I don't remember the name
right now, and it probably would not work for a debian system.

Supposedly you can test your USB image using Qemu, although I've never
done it myself.

http://live.debian.net/manual/html/ch03s03.html#id2911160

I tried qemu when I was trying to get Debian Live to work but all it did
was it went to 100% and stayed there doing nothing. I didn't have the
time to investigate, but I have a feeling you need more RAM than I have
to run a VM under qemu - just to boot one, even.

Thanks,

CJ


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