Siduction Forum

Siduction Forum => Experimental => Topic started by: dzz on 2012/01/04, 19:02:35

Title: Non-destructive usb installation
Post by: dzz on 2012/01/04, 19:02:35
I'm putting this in "experimental" because I used an unusual install method.

I have been running siduction (xfce 386 rc) "fromiso" on a usb stick and getting on quite well.

This pendrive has other essential data, live systems and a manually-created syslinux mbr. From what I read in the manual, the recommended usb install methods will destroy all.

So I simply copied the the iso, extracted initrd and vmlinuz  to a new directory "siduction" then renamed the iso to "sidu.iso" for convenience. In the exisisting syslinux.cfg is now this new entry :

Code: [Select]
menu label start_siduction_686_xfce defaults
menu default
kernel /siduction/vmlinuz0.686
append initrd=/siduction/initrd0.686 boot=fll fromiso=siduction/sidu.iso vga=791 lang=en_GB


It boots and seems to run well like that, persistence works too. The problem is, desktop icons show for all partitions and they are all seen by xfce as "removable volumes.

As I have quite a few partitions on 3 fixed disks, that's a lot of desktop clutter. I can turn off "show removables" in xfce settings but then a newly-plugged usb, which I need to show, does not.

Since my dvd burner is fried I did a HD install from this setup. Apart from an entry for the usb appearing in fstab (which I half-expected and can deal with anyway) all was apparently error-free, including grub to PBR.

However, desktop device icons still show fixed disk parts as removables. What I can't work out is if this "live boot" method is the cause, if so why.