On 07/17/2017 07:36 PM, Tod Merley wrote:
I have had some luck with using flash drives as bootable disks by
doing the following:
1. Choose a disk NOT designed for security. The reason is if you want
security then the boot sector you want secure, that is NOT usable to
boot anything. You want a standard storage device.
2. You need at least 20mb/second of read performance. In general
faster is better but of course more expensive.
3. Once you have the flash drive partition it with something like
GParted. DO NOT TOUCH THE FRONT OF THE DRIVE. Rather “shrink” the
existing data partition from the back of the drive leaving at least a
couple of hundred megabytes of the original partition. Many drives
store critical information between the data partition and the very
front “top” of the drive. There is a firmware layer on flash drives
and the actual resulting hardware I think varies after the
manufacturing process has ended. Tables I think are kept there.
Without them things can get very slow.
4. Please note that this takes a lot of patience. Do NOT assume the
process has stalled. Go away for some hours and then determine if
that might be true. But the next step is to do a standard install of
your OS using the area created when you partitioned the drive. Also,
when updating wait a long time after updates are complete before
shutting the box down and pulling the drive. They seem to like to
background big data transfers and the drives are often not that fast.
Give them a long time to complete what they are doing when a lot of
data is involved.
5. I have not yet found a situation where they boot on USB3 – OTOH I
have very little of USB3 and my machines are old. I use USB2 ports
even though many of my bootable flash drives are USB3.
6. Consider using an M.2 ngff SSD in a USB3 converter box. They just
seem to work but are a bit more expensive. I am using one right now.
Have a lot of fun!
Tod
First you say you haven't found a way to boot on USB3--then you say
consider using an USB3 converter box. What is that? Something to convert
USB3 back to USB2? Or what?
--doug
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