[sf-lug] About USB partitioning and formatting

[jim]

   Thanks for the note, Ken. If you get around 
to manually retrying with an inspectable initrd, 
i hope you'll report (what commands to use, what 
return info to expect...). I'd be up for sharing 
the effort, maybe with food or some such. 



On Sat, 2009-09-19 at 10:18 -0400, Ken Shaffer wrote:
> 
> 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
>