Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?
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A bit of background --
- I've been using a Kingston Digital DataTraveler on my keychain for awhile since I wanted one with a one-piece housing that frankly wouldn't fall apart after couple months in my back pocket
- I like formatting my machines every once in awhile, and recently used the Ubuntu Startup Disk Manager (and later on, UnetBootin) to load a Xubuntu live USB image onto a 6GB FAT32 partition on the stick. The rest is probably NTFS, and I use it to store
movies and TV showsmore Linux ISOs
However, the past 2 times I've tried to use said live USB, the image has been corrupt or didn't load for whatever reason. A re-install using unetbootin usually fixes the issue. However, I want to actually be able to depend on the live USB image when I need it, instead of invariably having to boot up another computer, download the image, install onto the partition, etc...
The other day, I tried plugging it into a Dell XPS 13 I bought and it wouldn't boot into the live environment. I then tried plugging it back into my desktop and it wouldn't even mount :( Later that evening it did mount properly on my laptop and I used unetbootin to install the Xubuntu image. Let's see if it makes it to Tuesday when I'm in office next...
- Should I even bother with an image on the usb key?
- Maybe I should just use
dd
when setting up the usb key
It's gotten to the point that it honestly feels like I'm knocking bits and bytes out of the drive as I'm jangling my keys around...
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Long since forgotten the error, but every time it happens again after a reflash, it's a different error.
Dug this up out of my search history:
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As far as I know, all of the Ubuntu installation discs are hybrid ISOs, so there's no need to use utilities like UnetBootin. Just use
dd
to copy the disc image to the USB drive.
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I use one of these
extremely useful, I have HDD/ISO images for almost anything I regularly use, adding more is just a filecopy to the unit (You do have to use NTFS but that's not a big deal).
Only real drawback is the size, requires a laptop 2.5" drive, so not conducive to keychains... :(
But with the 2 Tb drive I slipped into it, it's been rocking like a champ and works just fine even for random things like Windows To Go.
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@tsaukpaetra This would go well with all of the extra SSDs I have lying around...
Unfortunately I don't have any, but I do have a Maxtor drive Would you like it? I think by this point it is considered vintage.
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@julianlam Have you tried another USB flash drive? The one you have is probably just busted.
I keep an identical one on my keychain (well, mine's 16 GB, but otherwise identical) and I've never had a problem with it.
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I'm with @blakeyrat on this one, prolly just an unlucky busted drive. I have 3 or 4 on their own keychain, and they've been working fine for.... a couple years, now?
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@blakeyrat said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
The one you have is probably just busted.
Third this. Even name brands fail sometimes. I noticed it first when using a stick for my FreeNAS boot drive. While the system was running for a while the drive would just lock up on a random sector, rebooting was ok until it tried to read that sector.
I was thinking a problem with the wear leveling system, but didn't have time to fully investigate.
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Same here, had to replace a few sticks because they failed. Other than that I'm happy with liveboot images on my keychain.
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@gleemonk said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
Same here, had to replace a few sticks because they failed. Other than that I'm happy with liveboot images on my keychain.
if you're a dab hand with soldering you cna almost always rescue usb keys when they fail. that's because th eprime failure mode of them is the quartz timing crystal, it either comes unsoldered or breaks, so you just have to solder it back on or replace it with one from a different stick, and you can get the crystals for pennies on the dollar by buying super low capacity sticks in bulk, or sometimes you can find some company who bought a bunch for swag and couldn't give them aways so they'll give them away for free.
crack them open and desolder the quartz crystal tube thingie and you can repair most any usb key.
:-)
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@julianlam said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
However, the past 2 times I've tried to use said live USB, the image has been corrupt or didn't load for whatever reason. A re-install using unetbootin usually fixes the issue.
Other than a busted drive, this is something I find happens a lot if you plug it into a Windows machine and don't unmount and plug it out every time. While that might seem obvious, even shutting the machine down before doing that seems to mess something up there, so make sure you always properly remove it, even if you're just keeping it plugged in and then rebooting to boot from it instead.
Other than that, the setup with a bootable drive + a data partition is valid, I don't personally have a drive set up that way, but I know multiple people that do, and other than being careful about above I haven't heard them saying anything about it not working properly.
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Thanks all, suppose it is a bad stick.
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@onyx said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
While that might seem obvious, even shutting the machine down before doing that seems to mess something up there
Bullshit.
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@gÄ…ska said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
@onyx said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
While that might seem obvious, even shutting the machine down before doing that seems to mess something up there
Bullshit.
Must be magic pixies in machines I touched then. Also, my coworker who just confirmed he got the same thing multiple times.
Mind lending me your pixie wrangling device in that case? Mine seems to be broken.
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@onyx said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
@gÄ…ska said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
@onyx said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
While that might seem obvious, even shutting the machine down before doing that seems to mess something up there
Bullshit.
Must be magic pixies in machines I touched then. Also, my coworker who just confirmed he got the same thing multiple times.
Mind lending me your pixie wrangling device in that case? Mine seems to be broken.
what filesystem?
NTFS is designed to be in permanently attached storage, as are most linux file systems. As such the OS tends to keep a bunch of information in memory and only oportunistically flushes it to disk when the queues are idle. This is why you get corructopn of these file systems with an uncelan dismount.
FAT, VFAT and ExtFAT on the other hand are designed to handle removeable media where the media may be removed at any time and therefore flush their buffers to disk much more regularly. They also don't report the completion of an operation until it hit the disc.
That's why you get lower performance from the FAT series of filesystems. it's not that they're actually lower performing but rather that they're not buffering operations to memory like reiserfs, ext4, or NTFS would.
you could say the lower performance shows you the hiden cost of the oerations those other filesystems were hiding from you
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@gÄ…ska said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
Bullshit.
If you yank it quick enough, you could hit it between when the computer looks shutdown (aka the monitor is off) and when it actually is shut down. So it might be good advice.
But yeah, Windows NT does the whole unmounting/syncing thing to USB drives on shutdown so there's no technically difference between that and using "safely remove hardware".
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@accalia said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
sometimes you can find some company who bought a bunch for swag and couldn't give them aways so they'll give them away for free.
USB sticks are the new T-shirt :P
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@masonwheeler said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
@accalia said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
sometimes you can find some company who bought a bunch for swag and couldn't give them aways so they'll give them away for free.
USB sticks are the new T-shirt :P
among the tech industry, yes.
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@masonwheeler said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
USB sticks are the new T-shirt
"New?" I was getting those stupid 4 MB ones 10 years ago. I have one in the shape of an AOL running man logo, beat that.
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@blakeyrat WOW that's like THREE floppies man!
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@julianlam said
Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?
It's trickier than keeping a dead one, that much is for sure. You have to feed it and take good care of it, make sure it gets plenty of electrons--but not too much; that can be potentially fatal!
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@julianlam said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
Thanks all, suppose it is a bad stick.
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@blakeyrat said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
But yeah, Windows NT does the whole unmounting/syncing thing to USB drives on shutdown so there's no technically difference between that and using "safely remove hardware".
That's what I thought as well, but in this particular case it seems not to be. Mind you, I never had any data corrupted that way, so it doesn't just cut power to without unmounting it or something like that, but it does do something weird to bootloaders that doesn't happen if you unmount it manually it seems.
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Attempted an install today, stick worked fine.
EFI boot is new... What is that and why does it require a partition
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@julianlam said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
EFI boot is new... What is that and why does it require a partition
EFI is the update to BIOS that allows for more GUI-ish system configuration menus for your motherboard and additional checks during the boot process that can allow for verifying the signature of the kernel of what you're booting (Secure Boot), to try to provide some protections against rootkits and the like. IIRC, installing Windows 8/10 with an EFI booted computer requires the boot USB stick is NTFS partitioned? It's been a while since I was active in that realm, so I might be talking out my ass.
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Running Xubuntu 16.04 now, xfce has really come a long way since I first dabbled with Linux... I disabled secure boot from the BIOS... perhaps re-enabling it is a good idea.
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@julianlam said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
I disabled secure boot from the BIOS... perhaps re-enabling it is a good idea.
it is a good idea, unfortunately having it enabled can play merry hob with Linux installs.
*buntu usually handles secure boot pretty well, and the others are getting there but they're far from perfect yet.
still it can't hurt to try as a secure boot failure just means you need to go back into the bios and turn it back off.
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@izzion said in Feasibility of keeping a live USB on a keychain usb?:
installing Windows 8/10 with an EFI booted computer requires the boot USB stick is NTFS partitioned?
Technically it might be supported (depending on firmware), but generally it's FAT32 in practice.