I have an older laptop that I want to use as a simple media server on my home network. I would like to avoid using the internal hard drive except for booting (BIOS does NOT support booting from USB).
My thought was to mirror the hard drive (currently has current install of Arch Linux) onto the flash drive and then after booting switch over to run everything from the flash drive.
I read the following article about using a RAM disk (HOW-TO: Boot OS into RAM for speed and silence) but ran into problem because the USB subsystem does not seem to be initialized soon enough (I create root and home paritions on the flash disk and modified fstab to pick those - didn't work).
Any thoughts?
Answer
My suggestion would be to install the boot partition containing a bootloader (I like extlinux), your kernel image and your initramfs to you hard disk.
Then you configure either the initramfs to mount your root partition (which is on your usb drive) or you add the partition as an argument for the kernel in the bootloader configuration. The latter is simpler to achieve, just add something like "root=/dev/sdb1" to the kernel arguments, for a root fs of the first partition on the second hd. Also, you won't need the initramfs if you don't use one already.
Both approaches results in something virturally identical to a boot from usb, but the initramfs approach lets you go (further) to town with lvm, crypto or exotic filesystems om the usb drive.
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