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#1 2009-08-17 02:01:40

egan
Member
From: Mountain View, CA
Registered: 2009-08-17
Posts: 273

Installing Arch on a USB Hard Disk -- Considerations? [SOLVED]

I am about to switch to Arch from Ubuntu, so I have been a bit spoiled. Even so, I am ready to embrace The Arch Way!

I wish to install Arch on a USB hard disk. Currently I run Ubuntu off this disk, but there stuff was mostly automated (and thus opaque). I read some documentation on the Arch Wiki pertaining to my course of action, but I am still a bit confused. I want to make initial installation as painless as possible, as I really need a functional Unix to get any work done.

Basically, what I have gathered is that in order for the inital ram disk to access the root volume it will need the USB hook included.

So how do I go about doing this? If I were to edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf in the live environment, would the installation process automatically generate the correct initrd? If not, what would be the process to have a bootable system after exiting the live environment?

Is this all that needs to be done to boot from a USB device? Obviously I have to install GRUB to the correct partition and check menu.lst; I had to do that in Ubuntu as well.

Thanks for any advice or information.

Last edited by egan (2009-08-22 18:28:15)

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#2 2009-08-17 04:06:45

OneEyedPimp
Member
Registered: 2008-05-02
Posts: 103

Re: Installing Arch on a USB Hard Disk -- Considerations? [SOLVED]

That should be it. I have installed Arch on an external drive, and I dont recall including that hook in there. But You can edit the install mkinitcpio.conf during the install. One of the pages will come up and you have to set the host name the root pass...essentially all of the config files. I believe that the mkinitcpio.conf is one of the options. Just edit it there and you will be good to finish the install and it should work. Bearing that you got grub correct of course. :-)

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#3 2009-08-17 13:40:46

egan
Member
From: Mountain View, CA
Registered: 2009-08-17
Posts: 273

Re: Installing Arch on a USB Hard Disk -- Considerations? [SOLVED]

OneEyedPimp wrote:

That should be it. I have installed Arch on an external drive, and I dont recall including that hook in there. But You can edit the install mkinitcpio.conf during the install. One of the pages will come up and you have to set the host name the root pass...essentially all of the config files. I believe that the mkinitcpio.conf is one of the options. Just edit it there and you will be good to finish the install and it should work. Bearing that you got grub correct of course. :-)

Thanks for the information. Once I get this working I will go edit the wiki to make it more clear.

If I do edit the mkinicpio.conf, will it be overwritten by pacman? I am a bit unclear on the .pacnew .pacsave stuff, and I would hate to overlook something in the pacman log, reboot and have a disfunctional initrd!

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#4 2009-08-17 16:08:32

svanberg
Member
Registered: 2009-07-16
Posts: 88

Re: Installing Arch on a USB Hard Disk -- Considerations? [SOLVED]

I'm running Archlinux at work from my external harddrive and it's work flawless. But don't forget during the install to edit the file mkinitcpio.conf and add usb to hooks.

I used only 10 Gb to the system on my harddrive and the rest got NTFS partion.
The funniest part of this install is that if i plugin the harddrive into Windows it's appearing like one logical drive. tongue

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#5 2009-08-17 19:02:49

OneEyedPimp
Member
Registered: 2008-05-02
Posts: 103

Re: Installing Arch on a USB Hard Disk -- Considerations? [SOLVED]

egan wrote:

Thanks for the information. Once I get this working I will go edit the wiki to make it more clear.

If I do edit the mkinicpio.conf, will it be overwritten by pacman? I am a bit unclear on the .pacnew .pacsave stuff, and I would hate to overlook something in the pacman log, reboot and have a disfunctional initrd!

The .pacnew and .pacsave stuff should be created when pacman already finds the file there. So you upgrade Xorg, it wont overwrite the xorg.conf file, it will just put a new one in there called xorg.conf.pacsave for in case you need some new fangled options out of the new config file. At least that is my understanding of how it works. In my year and some change using arch the only file that I have had overwritten is my acpi files, but that is just a minor annoyance.

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#6 2009-08-18 04:11:04

egan
Member
From: Mountain View, CA
Registered: 2009-08-17
Posts: 273

Re: Installing Arch on a USB Hard Disk -- Considerations? [SOLVED]

Thanks for the help guys. I will try out the install when I have some time, and see about adding a little to the wiki.

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