Re: Running Slackware from USB

root <NoEMail@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
When my wife visits our [grown] children she has to use
their computers. The obvious solution is to get a laptop
but we missed our chances on Black Friday. I decided
to see how she could use a USB external hard drive.

What I worked out might be of use/interest to others:

I started with a WD USB external hard drive, the
Trinity rescue disk, and the Slackware 12 installation
disks. I booted the Slackware disks and installed
Slackware on the external drive. For the remainder
of this discussion assume the external drive is
addressed as sda1, and that we have Slack 12 on that
partition. I installed with an ext2 file system.

Now boot up the Trinity rescue disk. Do:
cdrecord --scanbus
to locate the external drive. We have assumed
that it is sda1.

Then, under the rescue system do the following:

mkdir /sda1
mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /sda1
cd /sda1
cp -aRf ../* .

let this run until you start getting copy errors for
/proc stuff and then CNTL-c the command.

You only have to do the copy process once. Umount
the external drive and you are set.

When you want to run on a new computer plug the
external drive into the USB port and boot off
the Trinity disk.

Do the cdrecord --scanbus to locate the external
drive, mkdir the directory, and mount the external
drive. Then chroot to the mounted directory
and you will be running your Slackware on
the machine.

I tested this on 3 different machines, all of
which used dhcp to access the web.




I forgot to tell how to close a session:

When you want to end your session exit
from the chroot console and umount the
external drive partition. You can then
exit the Trinity rescue.
.