Arch Linux

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Member

Registered: 2013-12-17

Posts: 10

/boot on USB, everything else on the HDD (separate GTP partition)

Hello, everyone!

I don't want to mess with my Windows 8 installation AND recovery options (partitions), so I thought I could install Arch Linux on a separate GPT partition I created and for the sake of (again) not messing anything up, use a spare USB key for booting.

Can I do that?

Is there anything I need to be aware of before proceeding?

ndt

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2011-10-12

Posts: 33

Website

Re: /boot on USB, everything else on the HDD (separate GTP partition)

Use UUIDs everywhere is my advice. You don't want the labels changing as you reboot, unplug your flash drive, etc.

See this bbs thread for examples of how people have done this in the past.

If you're using syslinux, my bet is you could do something like:

LABEL arch
	MENU LABEL Arch Linux
	LINUX ../vmlinuz-linux
        APPEND root=UUID=this-is-my-root-uuid rw
	INITRD ../initramfs-linux.img

where "this-is-my-root-uuid" is the UUID of the partition containing the root of your filesystem.

Then in /etc/fstab:

#
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>	<dir>	<type>	<options>	<dump>	<pass>
#tmpfs		/tmp	tmpfs	nodev,nosuid	0	0
UUID=this-is-my-root-uuid / ext4 defaults 0 1
UUID=this-is-my-boot-uuid /boot ext2 nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 1

where "this-is-my-boot-uuid" is the UUID of your boot partition. Any other partitions could be added as normal.

In your BIOS, set things to boot from your flash drive. During installation, when you are mounting the partitions, do e.g.

# lsblk /dev/sda
# lsblk /dev/sdb

Where "/dev/sda" is your hard drive and "/dev/sdb" is your flash drive, to get the partition layouts of each. Assuming you have the following partition layout:

sda
    sda1 windows
    sda2 arch
sdb
    sdb1 boot

Then your mounting code during the installation will look like this:

# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
# mkdir -p /mnt/boot
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/boot

If you are on a BIOS system, don't overwrite the MBR of your HDD disk, and everything should go smoothly. I think for UEFI you would just need to flag the /dev/sdb1 partition as bootable, and be careful not to overwrite the one that came with Windows ...

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