[sf-lug] About USB partitioning and formatting

[Ken Shaffer]

Hi Jim,
Last year I tried the manual approach with setting up a bootable usb
stick and got to the point of grub booting, but not being able to see
anything on the stick.  I guessed the initrd didn't have the right devices
to see the stick.  Anyway, I then used an Ubuntu Intrepid live CD to install
to a 4G stick successfully, taking all the defaults -- that's right, I
didn't even change the ext3 to ext2 or the relatime to noatime.  With a
working initrd I can examine, I'll try the manual approach again sometime.
I successfully upgraded the stick to Jaunty after log cleanup and removal of
large packages Gimp and OpenOffice (6 hrs, and needed a 2G stick for
the package downloads).  The stick has been updated at least monthly,
and used occasionally with no problems.  Last week, I did change the mount
to ext2 and noatime, and the article you posted gives me some ideas on
setting up the next one -- should help performance.  I suspect the
filesystem drivers
have an enormous effect on the longevity -- caching and reluctant writes
will reduce the number of writes when directories are copied.
  Another datapoint -- I burned out a new 2G sd card after about 400 meg
just by trying to copy the user directories off a windows machines.
Ken
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