Arch Linux

jordanwb

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2008-07-01

Posts: 151

[Solved]Does a flash drive have an MBR

I have a 2Gig flash drive and I want to try installing Arch on it. I was wondering does a flash drive have a MBR? If so does Grub install in the same manner? Also which file system should I use? ext3 or reiserfs or any other journaling fs might be hard on the flash drive, considering that flash memory can be written only so many times.

Last edited by jordanwb (2008-08-03 15:48:50)

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: [Solved]Does a flash drive have an MBR

Faunos is archlinux on a USB flash device and uses grub as the bootmanager.  It is a r/o system and can be upgraded with "save session".  The writes occur only when adding packages with "save session" which uses aufs in an overlay manner.

My system in faunos is discless, using a raid array of two compact flash devices for a pacman cache from which a desired package can be installed into ram (no flash write) and used for a given session.

The upgrade of pacman cache in raid0 produces a write to new cells, no overwrites occur.  Thus the write activity is pristine and soes not limit the use of the flash devices due to repeated writes to the same cells.  The result is older packages are retained along with the upgrades.  Pacman -- cachedir (name of directory) -Syuw is the upgrade mechanism and the installs are made with ...pacman -U (.pkg.tar.gz) from the raid0 devices.

Works great...posting from Faunos!

---

Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit!     X-ray confirms Iam spineless!

jordanwb

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2008-07-01

Posts: 151

Re: [Solved]Does a flash drive have an MBR

Faunos is archlinux on a USB flash device and uses grub as the bootmanager.

So yes.

jordanwb

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2008-07-01

Posts: 151

Re: [Solved]Does a flash drive have an MBR

I installed Arch to the flash drive, with grub to it's MBR, but when I try to boot off of it it says "Non system disk"

[Solved]Forgot to set the boot flag.

Last edited by jordanwb (2008-08-03 15:48:25)