A short time ago, I pointed out a reduced price offer on 16-gig lanyard USB flash drive. While a colleague pointed out I could easily buy a 150gig hard drive for $45-$50 more than I paid for the lanyard drive ($41), I didn't want to lug around a big drive (that's the laptop's role right now).
My 16-gig drive arrived last week and I had a lot of fun reformatting it, partitioning it (using UbuntuLinux's Partition Editor) into two pieces...about 4.8gigs for UbuntuLinux (9.04) and the rest for data.
When I used Unetbootin to install Ubuntu, I forgot that all I was doing was setting it up to mimic a CD boot. That's not what I wanted. I wanted to be able to store my information, customize the desktop, install software, etc. To accomplish that, I had to take these steps:
- Use a PC and boot off a flash drive (CD would work, too) with Ubuntu 9.04. The hard drive of the PC was not affected or touched at all.
- After booting, plug-in my 16gig flash drive, unmount it and then partition it using Ubuntu's Partition Editor.
- Install ubuntuLinux to the 4.8 gig partition of my 16gig flash drive
- Reformat the remainder (about 10.1 gigs) as FAT32 to make it widely compatible with every OS I use (Mac,Win,UbuntuLinux)
I'm now able to boot off the 16gig flash drive and have a portable environment of tools I like ready to go. Doing the same isn't hard at all for Mac OS X Leopard...just boot off a CD and install the operating system to the Flash drive (at least 8 gigs required). With more space, I can imagine lots of things one can do.
;->
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