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Usable operating system on USB thumb drive

Fardringle

Fardringle

Diamond Member
I have used the Windows (and DOS) Ultimate Boot CD frequently to fix problems on computers I am working on where the installed OS will not boot for some reason. It's a great tool. However, I would like to put a bootable OS on a USB thumb drive in part for convenience and portability but also so that I can actually install new tools and utilities directly to that bootable OS when an application is updated or I find something new that I want to use without having to completely rebuild the thumb drive install each time. This applies in particular to antivirus definitions since they are updated frequently and are the most common tool that I use with a boot CD.

I have successfully created bootable thumb drives with Windows using BartPE and Linux using a variety of different tools and Linux distros. They all boot into the OS from the thumb drive and each have a way to customize the install with some additional applications BEFORE installing to the thumb drive, but since all of the options I have found really just put a basic image of the OS installer on the drive and don't actually install the operating system, it's not possible to install new applications while working within the bootable OS.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has ever wanted to do this but I just can't find the instructions despite many hours of searching. I really don't care if the thumb drive boots to Windows, Linux, or something else, as long as I can work with the OS on the thumb drive the same way I would if the OS was installed on a regular hard disk with the ability to install, update, and uninstall applications.
 
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I took a closer look at those instructions and it just uses the same Universal USB Installer that I have already tried with several different Linux distributions including Ubuntu and was not able to get it to let me install applications or make changes while booting from the flash drive.

However, the instructions did lead me to some more searching to find the step that is missing from the instructions which does allow persistent changes to the installed OS on the USB drive, and which apparently wasn't included in earlier versions of the Universal Installer. Within the Universal Installer screen, check the box labeled "Select a persistence option" and then choose how much space you want to have reserved to save your changes. The size selected is in addition to the space used by the actual Linux installation so it gave me an error when I tried to select the full 4GB size of the flash drive I'm playing with, but it was perfectly happy allocating 3GB to the Casper-RW persistence file. I actually used Ubuntu 10.04 instead of 9.10 simply because I already had a copy of 10.04 but the process and instructions are the same for all versions.

I haven't done enough with the resulting USB installation yet to know if it will cause problems for Linux itself to have all of the empty space on the drive allocated for that Casper-RW file, but so far it seems to be quite happy and has allowed me to install several applications onto the USB drive. If you want to save anything else directly to the thumb drive, don't use a Casper-RW file that will take up all of the empty space since it actually creates a file that reserves all of the space and it cannot be used by anything else.


I also found these instructions to actually install a full copy of gOS (Ubuntu/Debian variant) directly to the USB drive which could be a useful option if the one I'm trying now doesn't work out. The intriguing thing about this option is that gOS has WINE already included so Windows only applications like Malwarebytes can be used with it. This also has the added advantage that it doesn't need to use a Casper-RW file to reserve space to save persistent changes between reboots which means that free space on the drive can be used to store additional files and utilities, or to "rescue" files from a dead machine and then copy them onto a working Windows or Linux computer.
 
I took a closer look at those instructions and it just uses the same Universal USB Installer that I have already tried with several different Linux distributions including Ubuntu and was not able to get it to let me install applications or make changes while booting from the flash drive.
Click to expand...

Something else is up then, I just ran that installer, gave it a size to preallocate the COW image and off it went. After booting up I installed a few non-free drivers, remove O😵rg, etc and it was all persistent.
 
Nothinman said:
Something else is up then, I just ran that installer, gave it a size to preallocate the COW image and off it went. After booting up I installed a few non-free drivers, remove O😵rg, etc and it was all persistent.
Click to expand...

The bolded part is what I was missing previously since none of the installation guides ever actually said what that is or that it should be used to create an image that will save changed between reboots. I did finally figure that out and got it to work properly but my frustration came from following the directions instead of doing what I actually needed to do.. 😉
 
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