jerrylanejohns wrote:I need to run entirely from my USB drive as I'm using a computer for work to run Linux (I'm subversive...)
When Mint starts up, I notice that it hits the hard drive momentarily and continues to do that occasionally.
Can I modify the start up script to make Mint not even know the hard drive is there?
If so, can someone give me the steps to do it?
Thanks.
You can install Mint directly to a USB thumb drive(as I think you've done already?) and if done right Mint won't touch the internal hard drive. I'll walk you through it.
1. Get yourself a reasonably fast USB thumb drive, 4GB or larger(8GB or larger is recommended)
2. Boot off the LiveCD.
3. Install Mint to the USB drive.
__A. Use Ext2 as a file system to minimize read/writes to the thumb drive so it'll last longer.(no journaling)
__B. Give yourself
some swap space but not too much. Depending on the amount of RAM of the surrogate computer as little as 100MB but no more than 1GB.
__C. Make sure to install GRUB on the USB stick
NOT the internal hard drive.
4. Boot off your fresh USB install.
5. Now we'll optimize your fstab and swappiness a little to again minimize read/writes to your thumb drive to extend it's life.
__A. Change the swappiness by entering this in the terminal.
Add this to the bottom of the file and save and close it.
__B. Move tmp and log files to RAM by entering this in a terminal.
Add this to the bottom of the file.
Code: Select all
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /var/log/apt tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0
Note: If you installed to your USB from a computer that was running Linux there might be a reference in your fstab to the swap partition from that system, if so delete it.
In any case save and close fstab.
6. Restart your USB install for all the changes to take effect.
7. Customize your new install to your liking.
That's it, you should now have a
truly persistent USB Mint install that should boot and run on any computer that supports USB booting(and some that don't using plop
http://www.plop.at/) and Mint that never touches the hard drive(unless you want to).