Advantage of booting Linux from USB ?

jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
in Off-Topic
A lot of people seem to do it - what is the advantage ?

Assuming the MBR and /boot is on the USB disk - does it mean it is easier to recover a system when bust ?

Assuming the bootloader is bust - could you just attach the USB stick to another PC with say, vmware workstation, install a minimal copy of CentOS, change the kernel path and put the stick back into its original server and it just works ?
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Comments

  • prampram Member Posts: 171
    You could do that with a boot cd. Who exactly do you see booting from USB.
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  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    What I mean is, a lot of people I know have the MBR and /boot on USB stick and the data (whole '/' for example) on HDD. Question is not how to do that, but what the benefits are really.
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  • petedudepetedude Member Posts: 1,510
    Sounds like an odd config to me, but I can hazard some guesses:
    1. Use the same bootloaders on multiple PCs??
    2. Somehow get the kernel to boot more quickly?
    and most likely:
    3. Isolate the boot sector from workstation-based boot sector viruses
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  • ChooseLifeChooseLife Member Posts: 941 ■■■■■■■□□□
    I don't see that done often, would say it is an unusual set up. You could get the best answer on advantages by asking people who are doing it this way. I'd do it to simplify/quicken recovery process, should /boot and MBR get corrupted. Isolating from viruses could protect from some of them, but not all
    “You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.” (c) xkcd #896

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  • WafflesAndRootbeerWafflesAndRootbeer Member Posts: 555
    There are no real advantages to doing it except you can swap it out or upgrade easily if the OS gets borked. It's commonly done with machines configured as network storage because it means one more opening for an HDD or SSD or quick and dirty server/routing/firewall boxes but there is no practical reason to do it on an actual system because it will not perform comparably to anything running from a dedicated storage medium. USB booting of Linux distros is also used for maintenance/recovery purposes as it's perfect for running a LIVE distro to perform data recovery or other functions. They have maintenance/recovery specific distros for USB use.
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  • ChooseLifeChooseLife Member Posts: 941 ■■■■■■■□□□
    Just occurred to me - OP, were you referring to desktops, rather than servers?
    “You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.” (c) xkcd #896

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  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    ChooseLife wrote: »
    Just occurred to me - OP, were you referring to desktops, rather than servers?

    Both, one guy using this approach on a desktop, and one guy on a server .. I would ask them but won't see them for a while.
    My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p
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