Building a USB maintenance drive instead of using Live USB drives ?

[linux guy]

From time to time I need to do maintenance on Linux computers that involves
booting an OS other than the one installed on the machine.  Currently I
have 2 computers that need such attention.

In the past I've used Live bootable USB drives.  They have a number of
limitations including:

- they use Gnome.  I'm a KDE guy.
- they lack many of the tools I need - gparted, etc.
- they don't support persistence, so every time I boot with them I'm
running a script to get everything set up to where I was the last time I
booted.

One can supposedly make Live USB images persistent, but 1) it didn't work
when I tried it and 2) there are limitations, including that do a major
upgrade to the Live installation.  (ie, no dnf updates)

So... I'm thinking of installing Fedora35 for real on a USB drive and then
using that for my maintenance work.   Has anyone done this ?  Tips ?
Tricks ?  Advice ?

I'm specifically wondering about setting up partitions on a USB device.
Same as a SATA device ?  Anything special about booting a USB device
instead of a SATA or NVME device ?

Thanks.

[linux guy]

I'm thinking of using a Western Digital 2TB USB3.2 with a Type A
connector.  I assume that I can partition and format it to work as a
bootable OS ?

[Steven Usdansky]

Your assumption is correct. My desktop PC is an HP EliteDesk G2 Mini with two USB drives
(one HDD, one SSD) typically hanging off of it. Both external drives as well as the
internal drive are bootable. Each drive has its own ESP. No problem booting one of the
external drives on any of my laptops.

[Tom Horsley]

I've done a "normal" install of fedora on a 64GB USB 3 sandisk stick
and it worked fine, so I imagine a bigger drive would work also
(but I can carry around the stick on my keychain :-). I set the
mount options to include noatime so it wouldn't do so much I/O
to the usb stick, but that wasn't necessary, just seemed like
a good idea.

Now I using something different. I set things up using the info
here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multiboot_USB_drive

and have a bunch of different live images, several of them
specifically designed to have sysadmin and rescue tools,
and use grub2's ability to boot an iso image to boot which
ever seems most useful at the time (still on the same 64GB stick).

[linux guy]

Thank you, Tom.   This is exactly why I ask the group questions like this.

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2021-11-18 at 17:53 -0700, linux guy wrote:
>  Thank you, Tom.   This is exactly why I ask the group questions like
>  this. 
It's good netiquette to quote the part of a message you are replying
to, so people don't have to scroll back in a thread (which they may
have already deleted) to see what you're talking about.

poc

[linux guy]

Your comment spurred me to use a 256GB USB flash drive instead of the WD
spinning drive.  256 GB is large enough to do a couple system installs and
multi boot them as well as a bit of data backup.    If I need more data
backup than 256 GB provides, I can mount a spinning drive or even a network
drive and back up to that.

I should have done this a long time ago.  There have been many instances
where I've used Live drives when I should have built a maintenance drive.

[ja]

On Thu, 2021-11-18 at 19:59 -0700, linux guy wrote:
>  Your comment spurred me to use a 256GB USB flash drive instead of the
> WD spinning drive.  256 GB is
>  large enough to do a couple system installs and multi boot them as well as a bit of data
> backup.    If I
>  need more data backup than 256 GB provides, I can mount a spinning drive or even a
> network drive and
>  back up to that. 
>  
>  I should have done this a long time ago.  There have been many instances where I've
> used Live drives
>  when I should have built a maintenance drive.
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Hi

I have been doing this for many years.
Currently I just use the XFCE live spin on one USB stick as the
install media.
It is then just an "install to disk" to a second USB stick.

I use a Corsair Voyager GT for the Live Stick and
a Corsair Voyager GTX for the main device.

Install time less than 5 mins after the initial partitioning.
The GTX is fast and can be TRIMed if required.
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/256gb-corsair-flash-voyager-gtx-usb-31-ty...

If you want to go faster try one of these.
https://plugable.com/products/usbc-nvme
with
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-samsung-970-evo-plus-m2-2280-pcie-3...

John

[Steven Usdansky]

Nothing special about installing to a USB drive in my experience, other than ensuring it
has its own bootable EFI system partition.

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2021 at 20:20, linux guy <linuxguy123(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  From time to time I need to do maintenance on Linux computers that
>  involves booting an OS other than the one installed on the machine.
>  Currently I have 2 computers that need such attention.
>
>  In the past I've used Live bootable USB drives.  They have a number of
>  limitations including:
>
>  - they use Gnome.  I'm a KDE guy.
>  - they lack many of the tools I need - gparted, etc.
>  - they don't support persistence, so every time I boot with them I'm
>  running a script to get everything set up to where I was the last time I
>  booted.
>
>  One can supposedly make Live USB images persistent, but 1) it didn't work
>  when I tried it and 2) there are limitations, including that do a major
>  upgrade to the Live installation.  (ie, no dnf updates)
>
>  So... I'm thinking of installing Fedora35 for real on a USB drive and then
>  using that for my maintenance work.   Has anyone done this ?  Tips ?
>  Tricks ?  Advice ?
>
>  I'm specifically wondering about setting up partitions on a USB device.
>  Same as a SATA device ?  Anything special about booting a USB device
>  instead of a SATA or NVME device ?
>  
You can install linux on a USB flash drive or other external drives.  It is
nice to have a full linux system available so you can save things from the
system you are rescuing, but you may need to use the rescue kernel with
machines different from the one you are rescuing.  Some older hardware may
not be supported by newer kernels, so you want to check that all the
systems you may need to rescue can boot your rescue drive.

Typical USB flash drives are not meant for this use case, and my experience
has been that USB flash drives used this way didn't last very long.  There
are often small NVME SSD drives sitting in junk drawers because they were
replaced with larger drives.  I put one in a small case from Pluggable.
USB flash drives are so cheap that it makes sense to have a couple of them
in case one dies.   Cheap is also good if you need different linux versions
to cover all the systems that may need rescue.

In the distant past I used a Knoppix <
https://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix910-en.html> DVD for maintenance and
rescuing data from Windows machines that refused to boot.

-- 
George N. White III

[linux guy]

Thanks for all the advice.

How does one use a discarded NVME SSD drive ?  If it is SATA, put it in an
external enclosure ?

I installed F35 Workstation on a 256GB USB3 flash drive.  It boots and
works, but it is slower than the Live version.   Why would that be ?

Are there any special settings I should use because the OS is installed on
a flash drive ?    Swap ?  I/O ?

[linux guy]

The USB flash recovery OS is extremely slow compared to a Live OS.  It is
slow even when I ssh into it and not run a window manager.   Why ?   What
can I change to make it faster ?

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2021 11:34:37 -0700
linux guy wrote:

>  What
>  can I change to make it faster ? 
There are fantastic speed variations for different brand USB
sticks. When I set up my 64GB stick, I got the Sandisk "Ultra Trek"
specifically because reviews of USB sticks said it was the fastest
USB 3 stick available (though that was a long time ago, so something
else is probably faster today).

There is also the USB port to consider, if plugged into a USB 2
port it is gonna be slow no matter what.

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, linux guy <linuxguy123(a)gmail.com&gt; said:
>  The USB flash recovery OS is extremely slow compared to a Live OS. 
> It is
>  slow even when I ssh into it and not run a window manager.   Why ?   What
>  can I change to make it faster ? 
IIRC the LiveOS image is run from a squashfs-compressed filesystem,
which probably reduces USB accesses (at a cost of a little more CPU, but
most of the time, there's CPU to spare).  The filesystem type on top of
that probably also matters; I'm not sure which general-purpose FS has
the better access patterns for USB.
-- 
Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net&gt;

[George N. White III]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2021 at 12:04, linux guy <linuxguy123(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

>  Thanks for all the advice.
>
>  How does one use a discarded NVME SSD drive ?  If it is SATA, put it in an
>  external enclosure ?
>  
There are 3 common types of SSD drives, NVME and SATA NGFF (Next Gen Form
Factor?) that
use M.2 slots, and legacy (OGFF?) SATA.  There are enclosures for M.2 NVME
and SATA, for the
M.2 SATA NGFF drives you may need an adapter.  I have <
https://www.amazon.ca/StarTech-com-Adapter-Converter-Housing-SAT32M225/dp...
>  

>  
> I installed F35 Workstation on a 256GB USB3 flash drive. 
It boots and
> works, but it is slower than
>  
the Live version.   Why would that be ?
>  
Different USB flash hardware or flash drive about to fail.  SSD's are
faster than most USB flash,
but I think some high-end USB flash drives now use SSD technology.


>  
> Are there any special settings I should use because the OS
is installed on
> a flash drive ?    Swap ?  I/O ?
>  
I think current kernels have heuristics to choose appropriate settings, but
they may guess wrong
for oddball hardware. Some of my spinning disks leave entries in dmesg for
failing probes, but
those are expected and handled by the driver.   There are many chipsets for
cheap USB devices
that don't adhere to standards, just do the minimum needed to work with
Windows.

-- 
George N. White III

[linux guy]

Update.

The  USB flash drive I chose (Kingston Data Traveler Exodia, 256GB) was
horrendously slow.  How slow ?  I did the install on an old machine.  It
took forever.  Like an hour.  I thought it was the machine, even though it
has a USB 3.1 port.  This morning I moved to a faster machine and attempted
to do a dnf update on the install.   Again, horrendously slow.  It came to
a complete stop.  I CTRL C'd the update and headed back to my local
computer hardware store.

I chose that particular flash drive because it features USB 3.2 Gen 1
capability and a 5 year warranty !

I replaced the Kingston flash drive with a Western Digital Blue SN550 M.2
NVMe SS, 500GB.  Because it was the right size, on sale and I thought that
a faster SSD would just further overwhelm the USB interface.  Also this SSD
apparently draws less current then some other faster ones and apparently
current draw can be an issue with USB to M.2 SSD adapters.

I mounted the NVMe SSD in a Vantec M.2 NVMe SSD to USB 3.1 Gen 2 type C
external enclosure.  (NST-205C3-SG) I chose this enclosure because it has
heat fins to dissipate the head generated by the SSD.  In fact, this
enclosure has a heat sink that gets installed on the SSD that contacts the
case.  From my reading, heat buildup can be a problem for NVMe SSDs running
in an enclosure like this.

Result: fantastic operating speed !   It is obviously not as fast as
operating on the native OS, but operating from the USB SSD is darn snappy.
I'm used to doing maintenance work with a slow Live USB drive.  THis USB
SSD is a fast Cadillac compared to them.  I am now very happy with my
"maintenance" drive.   I should have done this years ago.

The drive gets warm to the touch during regular use, but nothing alarming
so far.

Aside

An interesting thing happened when I installed F35 on the USB SSD drive
using the Live USB drive :  it chose a plain old file system instead of LVM.

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs         32G     0   32G   0% /dev
tmpfs            32G     0   32G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs            13G  1.9M   13G   1% /run
/dev/sda3       465G  4.7G  459G   1% /
tmpfs            32G   24K   32G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda3       465G  4.7G  459G   1% /home
/dev/sda2       974M  198M  709M  22% /boot
/dev/sda1       599M   14M  585M   3% /boot/efi
tmpfs           6.3G  144K  6.3G   1% /run/user/1000

[linux guy]

# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads:   30886 MB in  2.00 seconds = 15463.41 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1046 MB in  3.01 seconds = 348.01 MB/sec

[Samuel Sieb]

On 11/19/21 14:47, linux guy wrote:
>  Aside
>  
>  An interesting thing happened when I installed F35 on the USB SSD drive 
>  using the Live USB drive :  it chose a plain old file system instead of LVM.
>  
>  $ df -h
>  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>  /dev/sda3       465G  4.7G  459G   1% /
>  /dev/sda3       465G  4.7G  459G   1% /home 
The default file system is now btrfs. 
Notice how both of those 
filesystems are on the same device.

[Ed Greshko]

On 22/11/2021 11:47, Samuel Sieb wrote:
>  On 11/19/21 14:47, linux guy wrote:
> > Aside
> >
> > An interesting thing happened when I installed F35 on the USB SSD drive using the
> Live USB drive :  it chose a plain old file system instead of LVM.
> >
> > $ df -h
> > Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> > /dev/sda3       465G  4.7G  459G   1% /
> > /dev/sda3       465G  4.7G  459G   1% /home
>  The default file system is now btrfs.  Notice how both of those filesystems are on the
> same device. 
Of course "df -hT" would explicitly list the file system type.

See?  Nobody reads the man pages.  :-) :-) :-)

--
Did 황준호 die?