On May 30, 2014, aerospace1028@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > That was a good reminder about external-drive failure. I still > think the trade-offs suit my needs at the moment. Especially if you're just taking it for a spin rather than doing anything critical. > If I understand correctly--once I get everything loaded on the > external drive and the boot order fixed--with the drive attached to > my computer, I will have the option to boot into archlinux, and > with the drive disconnected--while the machine is powered > off--booting the machine will revert to automatically jumping into > the factory-installed Windows-7. The net effect should be similar > to when I boot the live-CD: without the cd in the tray (or this > case the external drive plugged into the computer), my computer > will have no clue there are any other operating systems in > existance and just go happily on its way? That all sounds correct. Given the light-weight footprint of a Linux install, I've successfully installed it on a small USB thumb-drive (8 gigs suffices, and 32 gigs was more than plenty). If you boot off of the device and shut-down cleanly, you shouldn't have any problems. You can also modify your mount-points in your /etc/fstab to force synchronous writes which will help prevent corruption but will have a performance impact. Or you can mount certain partitions as read-only (particularly /usr as well as your root/boot partition if you have /home, /tmp, and /var all read/write as separate partitions) which will help prevent them from getting corrupted. Though if you do that, you'd have to remount them read/write before you did any system upgrades. -tim _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list