Boot linux off hard drive and then switch to run from usb flash disk

Posted by Jesse on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Jesse
Published on 2010-09-18T18:22:57Z Indexed on 2011/01/08 18:56 UTC
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linux

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boot

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flash-drive

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?

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