[Solved] How do I prevent writes to /boot when it is not mounted?

alcedine · 2014-06-29 16:18:18

I'm booting from an USB drive, which I want to be able to take out once the system is up. This means that by default, /boot is just an empty directory. That's mostly fine, but in some cases (like if a kernel update comes in with pacman -Suy) things will get written into /boot without anything mounted there, which naturally throws things out of whack on the next boot. How do I deal with this? I don't want to plug in the drive for all updates and I don't want to have to go through the package list every time to make sure linux isn't on it. I thought about having a little script for mounting and unmounting the drive that also set permissions on /boot, but that's prone to error as I might forget to run the unmount script before shutdown or reboot and then I'm back to where I started. Is there a more robust version of this idea?

Last edited by alcedine (2014-06-29 16:34:10)

ids1024 · 2014-06-29 16:25:12

You can set IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf to prevent certain packages (such as linux) from being updated.

alcedine · 2014-06-29 16:33:50

Yes, that'll work. Thanks.

Slithery · 2014-06-29 16:37:19

I'd probably do something like this (warning, psuedocode ahead).

First create a wrapper function in your .bashrc (or .bash_aliases) that calls a script after pacman finishes...

pacman-boot () {
   pacman $1
   /path/to/checkboot.sh
}

Then in the checkboot.sh script

#!/bin/sh
If /boot is empty then exit.
Else move /boot contents to temporary directory
Prompt to insert USB
Mount USB and sync from temporary directory
Unmount USB

Arch Linux

#1 2014-06-29 16:18:18

[Solved] How do I prevent writes to /boot when it is not mounted?

#2 2014-06-29 16:25:12

Re: [Solved] How do I prevent writes to /boot when it is not mounted?

#3 2014-06-29 16:33:50

Re: [Solved] How do I prevent writes to /boot when it is not mounted?

#4 2014-06-29 16:37:19

Re: [Solved] How do I prevent writes to /boot when it is not mounted?

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