Opensuse Pendrive Linux Howto

As posted in OpenSUSE Weekly news #16

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/03/26/us...ion-from-linux/

The following tutorial covers the process of installing SUSE Linux to an external USB Hard Drive using the OpenSUSE Live CD. The process is made possible due to a custom Portable SUSE script created by James Rhodes. The user basically boots from the Live OpenSUSE CD and performs the installation via the included YaST2 Install script to install SUSE to a USB Hard drive. Then the user reboots from the Portable SUSE installation and launches the custom script to convert some files in the running SUSE system for portable compatibility.

Thanks James for directing us to your script and asking us to do a writeup of the Portable SUSE USB conversion process.
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As posted in OpenSUSE Weekly news #16

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/03/26/us...ion-from-linux/
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great find, WJM
* External USB Hard Drive (Rotating Platter "Not a Flash Drive")
Made my day, as I've been stuffing distros on my usb drive all this rainy day.

And add:
This tutorial covers the process of installing SUSE Linux to a USB flash drive using the OpenSUSE Live CD.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/03/28/us...-drive-install/

Made my day B)

And add:
This tutorial covers the process of installing SUSE Linux to a USB flash drive using the OpenSUSE Live CD.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/03/28/us...-drive-install/
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& a good additon to the post Snakdriver! Was actually just looking for this!

These are good ways to test drive or just have an OS handy on the go.

Cheers,
Wj

As posted in OpenSUSE Weekly news #16

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/03/26/us...ion-from-linux/
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This AM while waiting for the flood waters to recede here in NE Arkansas, I tried that & had success on a Maxtor 100GB usb-HDD.

I have a few pointers:

1st, I did this on an old machine with no HDDs.

The usb-HDD was formated with 3 primary partitions; an ext'd partition with 4 logical partitions. The LiveCD installer 's partitioner wanted to delete all of those & create one ext'd partition with a boot partition, etc.
It would not allow me to use the existing ext'd partitions, saying my old machine's bios would not boot beyond 1024 barrier (or something like that). Also, even though I went through the steps set forth in the guide, it would crash while attempting to access the usb-HDD even with the recommended partitioning.

I then used Parted Magic-2.1 and deleted those all those partitions leaving the usb-HDD unformatted. The install went well and I had it write Grub to the /boot partition. At 1st boot, it wouldn't; error 22. I could have fixed that with Grub on another machine, but I just redid it as I was already setup.

I then used Parted Magic-2.1 and deleted those all those partitions leaving the usb-HDD unformatted. The install went well; this time I forced it to "/", "/home & swap partitions and I had it write Grub to the MBR. No problems. Set the machine to boot from usb & 1st boot went swimmingly well.

Took it to my laptop & found that I had to go to root in runlevel 3 and do "sax2 -m 0=vesa" to get the vesa video driver up to get around a black screen.

I'll now add back those other OSes; play with it some & get back.

Yep, it's portable

I finally made it up to the ranch this PM. I could not get across my low-water bridge, so, came home & built the Flash Drive -- with success.

Again, I had trouble with the install regarding install & mount. And, again, I used Parted Magic to remove the partitions. Then, the install went with out problems; that is, with me accepting the recommended partition scheme which was really simple: 500MB swap & rest /sda2 = "/" root and writing Grub to MBR. The install took about 1,65GB, so there's plenty left for a few files.

Absolutely no problems with Portable SuSE. What you get is: "Welcome to Portable SuSE; I am now going to search for the "/" partition".

Again, when I did the trial on my Sager laptop, I had to use the "Vesa" driver. This is strange as the old desktop has an ATI card and the laptop also (but, it's a mobility version). Anyway, the Vesa driver makes it universal. BTW, with both devices, I also had to re-configure the nic/wireless (expected).

Have fun