You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
I use Arch as a guest OS in both my desktop and my laptop. I like to be able to have both Windows and Arch open simultaneously for various reasons. Rather than having two distinct copies of Arch, I'd like to just have one on my USB drive. Performance for the Arch OS is less of an issue than for the Windows hosts because I tend to do less intensive things with it. Mainly programming, and most of my programs are simple enough to run in a few seconds.
I've been googling around all morning and I think I've found many of the answers I wanted, but I'm not completely confident in them. I'd appreciate if anyone could confirm/unconfirm what I have so far and fill in the gaps in what I couldn't find. Reinstalling is a pain and I'd like to get it right the first time if at all possible. In case anyone else is searching for a similar thing in the future I'll try to summarize what I have so far.
Is it possible to boot a "real" operating system on an actual physical hard drive (or a USB drive) as a guest inside the current OS, or does the guest OS have to be on some sort of special virtual hard drive? I could make a "dummy" guest OS and then tell the guest to boot from USB, but that seems awkward. I think the answer is yes but I don't know enough about how virtualization works to say for sure. On a real computer just a hard drive obviously isn't a fully-functioning computer, but virtualization shares the host hardware, but then again maybe you need some kind of file telling the virtualization software some stuff about the guest OS, or maybe you don't. I don't know and I'm confusing myself thinking about it.
I'd like to be able to boot from the USB drive as a guest OS inside Windows. I'm familiar with Virtualbox, but I'm open to other alternatives if it would make things any easier. I'd like to avoid just putting a virtual hard disk on the USB drive as an ordinary file because that seems like an inelegant solution and I'd still have to worry about managing the other Virtualbox settings of the guest OS, keep them synchronized between both computers, make sure both computers upgrade Virtualbox at the same time, etc, etc. According to this site it's possible, but I haven't tried it yet so I don't know if that works.
I also considered booting to the USB as the host OS and then booting the local Windows OS as a guest with qemu or something similar (if that's possible), but then I'd have to restart the host computer after plugging in the USB drive (and before unplugging it on the other computer), and I'm concerned about performance inside the Windows "guest" OS. I'm sure qemu is very fast but there's always some overhead and sometimes it's more than you expect. I'm not sure if my laptop will even boot to USB in the first place. I sincerely hope so since it doesn't have a CD drive, but that's a separate issue.
Other related questions (hopefully easier):
Is there a Windows-friendly way of partitioning the drive so that some of it will be usable as a regular USB drive? Ideally I'd like it to be mountable from inside also as a way of transferring/sharing files between OSes but it's not strictly necessary. The link I posted says "Note that the USB device must be the first hard disk in your virtual machine or VirtualBox won’t boot from it." so if Windows will only read the first partition, then it's probably not possible.
How will the USB OS handle the often changing hardware? From the OS's perspective, I'd be replacing nearly all of its hardware every time it boots, so I wouldn't want it to get confused about anything. I guess operating systems can usually handle hardware upgrades without user intervention so it shouldn't be an issue, but I thought I'd ask because it's a bit unusual.
How much should I worry about minimizing hard disk writes? Presumably it's not as big an issue as it is with solid state drives, but it's worse than for standard drives, right? I don't know where to look for comparative longevity statistics.
Since I've had trouble attempting this before from the Windows side, I plan on using my current guest Arch to configure the USB drive. That should work fine, right?
I'd also appreciate any general advice about organizing the USB Arch installation in light of all of this. I realize that a lot of my questions aren't unique to Arch, so I'm sorry if this is the wrong place, but hopefully it's ok.
Offline
Since you have two computers and you would like the operating system to be bootable between both while having the data on the usb persistent, I would suggest alphaOS for an already configured operating system based on archlinux. It is bootable from USB drive and is below 150MB in size. For your use case (programming), I think it will be fine. You can install all the programs you have use for with pacman. This isn't really an answer to you question but it could be useful. Here is the alphaOS Homepage.
Last edited by rgb-one (2014-07-19 18:55:27)
Offline
Pages: 1