Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Debian on a USB Stick

Debian on a USB Stick
Making a Bootable USB stick (USB 2) with Debian 9.8.0 is humanly impossible.
1. I tried it with the latest DVD (First out of the 3 DVDs).
2. It has enormous amount of packages and does not fit in with a 16 GiB stick.
3. Writing took nearly four (4) hours and aborted with failure to install software.
4. I tried (thinking that it might help to recover) again.
It did not (probably no space left) write a Grub file.
5. I could mount Debian on a USB 3 64 GiB stick (no installing) with MultiSystem Software.
6. I tried UnetBootIn and failed.
7. Now Linux does not support writing a Grub file on a USB stick.

My advice is to use SSD external drives. 
I have several and discarding all OLD USB sticks.

Alternative is to try other Linux distributions on USB sticks.

AVLinux supports booting from a USB stick.

I do not know whether Peppermint, ElementaryOs or PinguyOS support USB booting.

It is time to say Good Bye to USB 2 sticks, except for data writing.
I am not sure one needs a swap partition for SSDs but all the same reserve some space for swap.
SSD does not support Master Boot record and one cannot install a second Linux distribution.
I have Debian on my Mater SSD but the reserved (for a second distribution) JFS partition is unusable.
New technology does not support OLD but very productive methodology.
My old turntable drives with terrabyte capacity have three or four distributions installed with over 500 GiB left for my data (films, photos, books and record of my Document Files).
One does not need cloud to store data, especially if your Internet connection and supply is pretty slow.
It is true in my case and I work only past midnight.

The technicalities behind it are tricky, but MBR is constrained by the capacity and limited number of its sectors—only 32 bits are available to represent logical sectors. You can find out more on Microsoft’s TechNet blog, but it means that MBR can only use up to 2TB of storage space. Anything larger than that, and the extra disk space is marked as unallocated and unusable.
GPT allows for 64 bits, which means that the storage limitation is 9.4ZB. That’s a zettabyte, which is one sextillion bytes or a trillion gigabytes. In practice, what it really means is that GPT has no real-world limit. You can buy any capacity drive and GPT will be able to use all of the space.
In short: MBR can support up to 2TB; GPT handles up to 9.4ZB.

My contention is why one need that much of capacity (only servers use that amount) to write a book which can be accomplished with a very small PDF (Portable Digital Format) file.
I do that with Abiword.