I've followed this article, and been able to get a fully working 32-bit installation on a Kingston DataTraveler 8GB pen drive, with a BIOS boot partition, and a home/root ext4
file system without journaling partition, and no swap. I'm using GPT partitions.
The problem is that pen in which I installed Arch only works on my computer. That is, if I insert it in other computer (the ones I tested had Windows with BIOS, not UEFI), I cannot change the boot order, because the pen does not appear as a bootable device.
How can I get it to run on any computer, the same way the usual Arch Linux installation pen does? That is the whole point, to have a pen that is ensured to boot on any computer to which I have physical access, rendering its usual data protection measures, i.e. login passwords, useless! (evil laugh)
I see the normal installation pen has an EFI instead of a BIOS Boot partition. I don't mind reinstalling the system, but I'd surely prefer if I could copy the latest installation media ISO and tweak the necessary options (auto login, hostname, clearing of changes on reboot, etc.). Can I do that? How exactly? Is this supported?
What exactly, besides what is referred in the article, and the EFI boot partition, do I need to watch out for? Must I use fdisk
or is gdisk
OK? What bootloader should I choose? I'd prefer GRUB, simply because I'm used to it, but I heard Syslinux is better (and easier) for this purpose.
grub.cfg
look like? That determines the root filesystem after booting the kernel.grub-mkconfig
. As I'm not sure I corrected those errors in/etc/grub
before generating the config, I can't report an error. I'll remove that part, as now I think it was probably a mistake of my own.