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Possible to install to external media?

Got a base ISO a few weeks ago and have Artix running on a small test machine with openrc and the IceWM window manager (no DE).  It's working great and is nice and small.

Now, I'd like to setup another machine that has a problem with the internal hard drive connector.  So, installing the OS on an external drive or flash drive would be ideal. 

Is that possible?  If so, are there any special instructions, tips, tricks, etc...?

Thanks in advance for any knowledge you may share.

Re: Possible to install to external media?

Reply #1 –
I have a laptop with a similar problem to yours, i.e. the motherboard does not recognise any NVMe drive that is installed. So I boot and run the machine entirely from a USB memory stick.  The fault has resulted in me having several different distros on different sticks and is actually rather useful!

Installation of any OS is as normal, no special measures are required in my case as the USB drive is the only target visible to whatever live OS I have booted from and installs absolutely fine.

Re: Possible to install to external media?

Reply #2 –
It should work just like any other drive. A USB stick will probably run slowly, a regular hard drive in a suitable external enclosure should be faster. USB 2 won't be as fast as USB 3, but numerous early USB 3 capable machines had a hardware flaw where the clock pulses for a USB 3 external drive would interfere with 2.4 GHz wireless causing a slow wifi connection if that's relevant. USB 2.0 era hardware sometimes had a faster ESATA connection available but ESATA capable drive enclosures are very rare, and I found ESATA could be temperamental and unreliable for whatever reason, it might be too old and odd to be well supported re drivers or it could just have been my hardware. Also definitely look to see if you have the possibility of a connection on the PCI bus which can be as fast or faster than SATA, using an adapter card in a desktop or suitable port on a laptop if there is one to fit a mini PCI SSD or better yet an NVME drive which would be a big performance upgrade over a regular SATA connected drive, and these are also usually relatively cheap to buy. So you need to look at what possible connections you have on your machine whatever it is to get a fast transfer speed. On one laptop I had it would only boot from a spinning disk SATA drive in a USB2.0 unpowered enclosure if I hit F10 at boot to go to BIOS then exited again, to give the drive time to spin up first, or else it wouldn't be found before the internal hard drive even though it was configured in BIOS to boot from USB as the first option, so you might occasionally get unexpected behaviour, but mostly it's fine.

Re: Possible to install to external media?

Reply #3 –
Interestingly, I just installed a copy of peppermint-devuan openrc on a USB3 stick and the boot time from power button to desktop is 36sec, which I think is very respectable for an old HP 250 G5 laptop from 2016 with 16GB ram.

I do find that installing a more bloated OS such as Redcore with KDE can take substantially longer to boot.  I tend to normally boot Artix dinit with just a WM (fluxbox) on that machine and the boot up time is very similar to the 36sec achieved above.

I have no doubt though that an external SSD would be quicker of course.

Re: Possible to install to external media?

Reply #4 –
There are custom builds like Puppy who load the system image onto ram before most things, speeding up bootup a lot from slow media.
If you have usb3.0 (and don't care about wifi as guy above said), then get a cheap usb3.0 card reader and a class uhs1/2 sd card (~32/64gb very cheap), for me artix lxqt boots in around 20 seconds. With an external ssd probably even faster.

Re: Possible to install to external media?

Reply #5 –
It's not all USB3.0 ports that have a problem with wifi, it was fixed in later models, and was only a problem on some things (like my Dell E7470) initially, also it's when using external SATA enclosures in particular, not other devices, something to do with the drive clock pulses being the same frequency( or some harmonic) as the 2.4GHz wifi signals, and insufficient shielding or filtering allowing interference to reach the wifi circuits on the motherboard.  Some laptops have an extra mPCIe (or similar) slot for a WWAN card etc. that isn't bootable from BIOS but can still support a drive, I've read (but not tried) that you can  chainload to them if you put a bootloader somewhere that is. I've only tried with cheap USB2.0 sticks and they are noticeably slow when running, not just booting, I expect a decent 3.0 one would be much better, usually you can find read write speeds for most things if you look up the device specifications online.
 

Re: Possible to install to external media?

Reply #6 –
Good to know and thanks to everyone for your responses.  I'm about ready to give it a go.  Hope it all works!!!