You know how a live disk will work on almost any box you boot it on? I want that kind of hardware flexibility on an external drive. I don't mean a flash drive - I mean a regular usb-connected external hard drive with spinning platters inside coated with magnetic media on which a working bootable ext4 filesystem resides. Not a virtual fs or anything like that. A plain, garden variety ext4 fs where changes to config files and so on are made to the magnetic media. I do not mean a virtual filesytem with "persistence." I mean exactly the same kind of setup that most of us boot from on a regular basis except that it is on an external drive.
This is no problem as long as I boot from the same machine I installed on. Installing to external media has been my standard practice for decades. Right now I'm running Bookworm from an external drive connected to a laptop that doesn't even have an internal drive installed. It's a traditional partition setup (I'll probably not abandon MBR until it doesn't work any more) with other OSs that are also bootable plus a data partition. And grub, of course, is on that same drive. I'd like to be able to connect the same drive to another machine and, with appropriate tinkering with BIOS settings if needed, boot Bookworm from it.
What packages do I need and what, if any, config changes do I need to make, to give it this kind of hardware agnosticism? Right now, when I want to boot my Desktop, I have to use a live flash drive made with Eggs (kind of like the old Remastersys).
This is no problem as long as I boot from the same machine I installed on. Installing to external media has been my standard practice for decades. Right now I'm running Bookworm from an external drive connected to a laptop that doesn't even have an internal drive installed. It's a traditional partition setup (I'll probably not abandon MBR until it doesn't work any more) with other OSs that are also bootable plus a data partition. And grub, of course, is on that same drive. I'd like to be able to connect the same drive to another machine and, with appropriate tinkering with BIOS settings if needed, boot Bookworm from it.
What packages do I need and what, if any, config changes do I need to make, to give it this kind of hardware agnosticism? Right now, when I want to boot my Desktop, I have to use a live flash drive made with Eggs (kind of like the old Remastersys).
Statistics: Posted by Lew_Rockwell_Fan — 2024-02-25 12:47 — Replies 12 — Views 178