Installing ubuntu on a USB hd

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 06:48:18PM +0200, Francesco Zamboni wrote:

>  ble to m
> odify it (moreover, even if I had suceeded modifying it, it was radically different form the example one.... without all the knowledge of the booting process, I fear I would have needed a lot of fiddling). Just so everybody can see of what I'm speaking, here it is the clearest source I've found... http://www.simonf.com/usb/

The Ubuntu kernel initrds use cramfs by default, which is a read-only
filesystem.  While in theory you could copy the tree, make modifications,
and create a new cramfs image from it, that isn't the best approach (nor is
modifying an ext2 initrd according to the instructions you found).

The best way to do it would be to add a script (see the mkinitrd man page)
which made the required changes in an automated fashion, so that when you
upgrade your kernel, your changes are propagated to the new initrd as well.

-- 
 - mdz