Booting from a USB stick

[John Austin]

On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 03:23 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Konstantin Svist wrote:
> 
> >> Finally, I found the USB stick was (perhaps not surprisingly)
> >> mounted read-only, so one could not eg add a user;
> >> or rather, one could, but it was not there on re-booting.
> 
> > Not that it helps, but...
> > you should remember that Flash drives have a fairly limited number of
> > write cycles - so keeping it read-only most of the time is probably best
> > for you in the long run.
> 
> I've seen wildly varying estimates of the number of writes allowed.
> I suspect the number has increased enormously with newer flash drives.
> I just bought an 8GB flash drive from memoryC,
> and there wasn't any warning of the life-time.

This made me spend money !!

Over 10 year life time 

http://www.corsairmemory.com/_faq/FAQ_flash_drive_wear_leveling.pdf

I am running a full F7 install on an 8GB stick

Could have had a 250/500GB SATA disk for the same money - but what the
heck !!

John

> 
> > But if you reallyl need it, you should be able to remount it as
> > read/write with "mount -o remount,rw /"
> 
> Actually, I'm quite puzzled by this.
> I did give this command.
> Before I gave it, "mount" showed /dev/sdb1 as ro,
> while after it was rw.
> However, the changes I made (such as adding a user)
> disappeared on re-booting (after running "sync").
> 
> If anyone can throw light on this I should be grateful.
> 
>