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On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:53:07 +0100, Brown Richard wrote: > Hi > > Has anybody done this please? And once it is done is it possible to > use it to install ubuntu? > > Thanks > > Rich Hi Rich, It is possible, and it is quite easy. What is not straight-forward, however, is tuning a standard Ubuntu install for USB flash-drive operation. Because of the way they're made, flash drives' lifespan shortens with write actions - the more you write to the device, the quicker it will die. There are some things you can do (such as mounting the / volume with the "noatime" option) to alleviate this. As far as the actual installation is concerned, I would personally recommend unplugging any and all harddrives prior to doing this for one simple reason... during installation, the USB drives are detected *after* the internal ones, so when it comes to installing the bootloader you'd need to install it on "hd3" (or something), but when you try to boot from the device it is detected first, so it'd be "hd0"... but all the info in the bootloader is pointing to hd3! If there are no internal drives present during installation, then it nicely skirts around this issue. It can be solved another way, but it involves fiddling around with conf files. I used an external USB-powered harddrive for several months and found that it works very well. Booting is a little slower than normal, but once up and running, it was fine. Hope this helps. Grant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html