Running Solaris 11 from a USB drive with persistent changes - possible?

I am wanting to use Solaris 11 as the basis of a NAS for home use; the hardware is a HP N40L Microserver populated with 5 HDDs. As all of these HDDs will be used for data storage in a zpool configuration, I have no more physical space (without further hacks) inside the case for an additional OS drive. Therefore, I am wondering if it is possible to run Solaris 11 from a fast USB flash drive. I know there is a live USB image, but AFAIK, any configuration changes made when running this will not remain after a reboot - is this correct? And if so, is there any way to make the changes persistent?
The only discussion I could find on this subject is this thread from a couple of years ago: https://forums.oracle.com/thread/2235078 - but I don't think the guy got a definitive answer.

Running the important rpool on USB stick is not my favorite configuration. I would recommend reducing your data pool down to 4 devices and putting your root pool on the 5th disk. People ask about this in the datacenter and I wrote a best practice for it, which is not to use a USB stick for rpool, here:
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29007/zfspools-4.html#gentextid-12349
Your data is important, but the root pool is very important for keeping your data available. In the datacenter, we also worried that rack vibration might wiggle the stick right out of the drive. For home use, I've heard about pets jumping on boxes and disconnecting disk cables. Sounds paranoid, but I've seen it/heard it all.
There is no reason why you can't put rpool on a USB stick, some operations might not be easy (see Dave's post), but I don't think its the best choice for optimal data availability.
Thanks, Cindy

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Running Arch from a usb drive[SOLVED]

I am trying to install arch on a usb drive with ext3 format. I have entered root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/... on the kernel line and in /etc/fstab file (as mentioned in the wiki). On booting I am dropped to a limited shell with few linux commands. On running 'blkid' there, I find that the fixed computer hard disk is detected as sda1,2 etc and usb drive is not being detected at all. The results are similar if I use root=/dev/disk/by-label/..
How can I boot from the usb drive.
Last edited by rnarch (2012-03-24 15:38:08)

My menu.lst:
# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
#initrd /boot/kernel26.img
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img
# (1) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux Fallback
root (hd0,0)
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
#initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=0811 type=ext3 ro
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
and mkinitcpio.conf HOOKS variable:
HOOKS="base udev pata scsi sata usb filesystems"
Hope those would help, good luck!

How do I boot from a USB drive with Leopard using a Lion iMac?

I'm looking to wave good bye to my MacBook Pro running Leopard and upgrade.
However, I need to keep a version of Leopard so I can run certain Audio Units that won't run on Snow Leopard or Lion.
I have made a bootable drive with Leopard on it, but I can't get it to boot on my iMac running Lion. It boots fine using the MacBook though.
What am I doing wrong here? Is what I'm looking to do possible any more, or do I need to configure the drive for use with a Lion machine somehow?
Any help would be very much appreciated...

Clearly not supported by Apple but as an Engineer I would like to know what the barriers are.
I believe that pre-installed Lion has extra disk partitions - probably for Utilities and software 'repair'. Having extra disk partitions is not new for Apple - they did it on some Macs long before OS X but these did not stop booting from other OSs or replacement with new single partition disks.
I suspect there are ways of doing it but it would probably invalidate the guarantee and might require removal of Lion, disk format, partition and reinstallation of OSs. Even then the reinstalled Lion may not work. I suspect it is only a matter of time before somebody posts a low risk way of doing this.

Running a boxee media server from a usb drive

I'm replacing my current boxee server with a little ion nettop. It will have an atom 330, ion graphics and 2gb ram. Instead of putting a hard drive in it, I want to use a usb drive with a persistent linux install to run the OS. For the sake of minimizing noise, heat, power consumption... I'm thinking of using one of the lightweight ubuntu variants or ubuntu minimal, mainly because boxee works best in ubuntu. I'm also toying with using arch since boxee-source is available in AUR.
Will running it from a usb drive cause me any issues?
All the media will be stored on an external hard drive or streamed over my network/internet. Theoretically, it shouldn't be doing a done of reading/writing to the flash drive correct? Shouldn't everything be loaded into ram?
Thanks. Just trying to get a some opinions of people smarter than me before I go through with this.

Network boot?
I only throw this out there because when my father finally upgrades his TV I'll pitch in a lightweight build so he can stream media from my system instead of asking me "hey can I get some new movies on my usb drive" to watch on his laptop. I had been toying around with the idea of doing a network boot so I can more easily manage the upgrades/system from my end... rather than taking the twenty steps to the living room with a keyboard. Additionally, the very same reasons you put forward were also considerations of mine. I also considered a USB boot drive, but concern about the longevity of such a solution led me to consider the PXE solution.
(plus since I know next to nothing about setting up such a system it would be an excellent opportunity to learn)

Does anybody knows how to install Windows 7 from a USB drive on 2010 MacBook Air running Lion?

Does anybody knows how to install Windows 7 from a USB drive on 2010 MacBook Air running Lion?

Tell my wife that!
This is the best I can do. This way you can use the 2011 MBA way to do things.
Look for the post from @jacktourist. (on page 2 about half way down) This seems to be the easiest.
There are a couple of more similar to this with pictures I've seen around but can't remember where.
Here's another search with added info. It's easier then it sounds.

Attempting to install Windows 7 from USB drive keep receiving "No Bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key" usb drive with windows 7 iso is inserted

As the topic says, i am trying to install windows from a usb drive, when i click install windows and the computer reboots to install a black screen comes up with "no bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key" the USB drive is inserted and pressing any key does nothing. Help?

You need to follow these guides to install from USB drive
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed -100-working-guide/
good luck

How to install Windows 7 from a USB drive!

This is even easier than installing Windows XP from a USB drive, and will also reduce the time taken to install Windows 7, it took me about 15 minutes!
The advice in the guide is also applicable to installing Vista.
You need basically:
a USB flash drive at least 4GB in size
a Windows 7 DVD
To sum up:
Format your USB drive, with the NTFS filesystem
Open Command Prompt as an administrator, and run the Bootsect.exe program off the Windows 7 CD to make the USB drive bootable
Copy the contents of the Windows 7 DVD to the USB drive
Restart your PC, press F11 (or whichever key it is) to access the Boot menu, and select your USB drive to boot from
Full guide here:
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/

Quote from: bnborg on 16-February-11, 10:28:04
I have done this and it is simple.
I cleaned and (re)formated an 8GB flash drive under Windows7 using diskpart. I chose quick format and a fat filesystem. It doesn't need to be ntfs. I had diskpart mark the partition active. I copied the DVD contents to the flash drive. I also made a folder on it for motherboard drivers.
After that, I booted the drive on a new machine. Windows7 setup came up, and didn't find any hard drives, other than the USB flash drive. I clicked the button to load drivers, and pointed it to the folder I had copied them to on the flash. Windows installed without problems.
Hi bnborg..Do u mind sharing with me your motherboard driver folder? I have the MSI U135DX Netbook and each time I hit the button to install Windows 7 it asks me for some mobo driver...Think i might need it to get tru with a successful install..

Running audio from an external drive question

HI there,
i am waiting the delivery of a high quality firewiredrive to run my audio tracks for my g5 imac.
I am a beginner at logic and i have logic express7.0 with logic pro 8 on its way.
In fact am a beginner at computer music. For the last 5 years i have been recording on an akai dps16 so this is a big learning curve right now, thought i have already made my 1st c.d. on logic express. Logic is awesome.
so
i am trying to get my head around running audio from an external drive as everyone recommends and instead of waiting for the new firewire drive to arrive i thought i'll learn this using my 500gig maxtor usb2.0 drive.
i have sussed out the record path business and all seems well. I have created 24 tracks of audio and i can see them in the audio folder in my logic project in my maxtor drive. So (i think) i have learned how to run audio from the maxtor, but what seems a bit odd to me is that when i run the exact same song from the internal drive ( I copied it from the maxtor drive) there doesnt seem to be any increase in the load of the system memory or the cpu as seen on activity monitor or logics audio performance meter.
I would have expected the identical song running from the internal drive to be more taxing on the computer.
Maybe i am doing something wrong but i dont think so.
Any help would be greatfully appreciated
Tom

The problem with internal drive is that is accessed by the OS and by Logic.
With a powerful Mac 24 tracks recorded at 16 bits and a sampling rate of 44100Khz are not n issue but increasing these values or the number of tracks the problem will appear and you will see the disk I/O meter going up very fast.
At that point you will begin to experiment audio hiccups before and a song stop later.
The same problem appears with drivers that have a reduced band (like USB 2.0) while firewire ones are faster, more stable and don't load the CPU.
cheers
rob

Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).
diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?
I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?
Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.
Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here ).

Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).
To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).
@rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

Backing up from one USB Drive to Another

I have two WD USB drinves that I use for my photos, one as the primsary drive,the other as the backup. When these were connected to my Windows PC I could use Western Digital's WD Anywhere Backup software to provide an "instantaneous" back up of any of the photo files that I hadd added / changed on my primary drive. This worked like a charm. Using the software with my USB drives connected to me MacBook Pro . Mavericks laptop the software thinks that it is working perfectly but is not backing up all the files. On a test I specified a folder with 40+K files and 240GB of data as the folder to be watched and backed up. The software reported a successful backup but only 11K files and 60GB of data had been transferred. I reported this to WD who indicated that the software is designed to back up from the coputer's hard drive to a back up frive, not from one external drive to another.
My question is: Does anyone know of any software that will run as a daemon and automatically back up new / changed files from one USB drive to another? Obviously I could do this with any of a multitude of products if I scheduled hourly/daily backups. However, I would prefer the convenience of "instantaneous" backups as soon as a change is made within a watched follder. From what I have read Chronosync seems to be the best backup software for Macs but, as one reviewer noted (http://www.macworld.com/article/2011101/review-chronosync-4-3-5-a-multitalented- file-sync-and-backup-tool.html) "I would like to see ChronoSync go one step further and offer an option found in some other sync software: the ability to watch specified folders and synchronize changes as soon as they occur rather than waiting until the next scheduled run." Can anyone point me to the "other sync software" that offers this capability?
Thanks in advance
Brian Catterall

SOLVED
Once I got Time Machine to perform totally new backups it picked up the new external drive containing my images.
John

How do you autorun a Flash Projector (Windows) from a USB drive?

I got a Windows Flash Projector (.exe) that I need to autorun from a USB drive. I just want the user to be able to plug in the USB drive to their machine and have it start running without any menus. I've been using the following with no luck:
[autorun]
open=KSF_USB_main.exe
The project is composed of a number of .swf files that load into the "KSF_USB_main.swf" file. There are also PDF and FLV links within some of the movies.
I have the "autorun.inf" file and all other files (including the .exe Projector file) on the USB drive. When I plug it in to a PC it brings up the "What Do You Want To Do?" window and doesn't autorun.
I've tried some 3rd party software that creates a menu file with no luck.
Any suggestions?

This feature may have been disabled in some versions of Windows and some types of USB drives:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971029
read carefully because it might be misleading at first glance.

Booting from external USB drive

I was wondering if there is any way to boot from a USB drive that I have? I partitioned the drive, erased it, and its basically ready to go. But I can't install Mac OS X on it because it says that I cannot reboot from the drive.
I know that iBook G4s generally can't boot from a USB devise but is there any way to get around this?

If you're computer is having kernel panics there's a conflict; either software or hardware. 2GB of free space isn't enough but I haven't seen anything that suggests KPs are caused by too little free space. Your computer should start fine with 2GB free. It may have problems after a period of use but it would startup and run.
Try starting in Safe Mode. If successful move some of your files to the external drive and then restart normally. If it KPs again, restart in safe mode and disable all startup items in System Preferences>Accounts>youraccount and restart. If it KPs again go through the linked troubleshooting steps by Dr. Smoke step by step. That's the only way to resole your problem.

HT1923 hi, my mac air is really low on disk space, can i remove iTunes (which is huge) to an external hard drive to free up space and then just run it from the hard drive. instead of taking space on the mac? even if the mac no longer has enough to accommo

Hi, my mac air is really low on disk space, can I remove itunes (which is huge) to an external hard drive to free up space?...and then run it from the hard drive instead of the mac,even if the mac no longer has space to accomodate the size of the library?

Yes.
Copy your music iTunes Library folder to the external drive and change the Advanced settings in iTunes to point to this new location.
Once you're happy with these changes you can delete the same Library from your User account to free up space on the internal drive.

Running iTunes from external hard drive, new computer, where to start?

I've seen several threads relating to this, but I'm a bit confused. For some time we have been running iTunes from an external hard drive with no issues. We now have a new laptop with windows 8, and I'm not sure where to start to set up iTunes (we replaced the computer with a laptop). Do I need to do a new install of iTunes on the laptop? Do I install it to the hard drive (C) or to the external drive (G)? My biggest source of concern is losing the library. I also want to be sure that we can continue to run iTunes from the external drive, I don't want it taking up space on the laptop hard drive.

With more & more people looking towards external drives as a storage solution, it's important to warn them, that although using one within iTunes is a great idea, it comes with its issues & can be a step towards a disastrous sequence. In such a scenario, each time iTunes is launched it'll look for the library that resides on the external drive, & if that drive's not connected, iTunes will open with an empty library. You know what's comming next, rite ? An empty iDevice. This happens because 'by default' iTunes is set to Auto-Sync & if you're using an external drive, the potential for a messy problem goes way up. So in short, remember these points. when using an external drive(library).
. Always connect your external drive prior to lauching iTunes.
. Always ensure iTunes sees your external library prior to connecting your iDevice.
. Disable the 'Auto-Sync' feature from within iTunes prior to connecting your iDevice.
. Always wait to connect your iDevice until thee aforementioned points are confirmed.
As stated earlier, using an external drive with iTunes isn't a problem in & by itself. But if the external drive's disconnected & the 'Auto-Sync' feature's left at its default setting(enabled), a family member could loose all their data simply by connecting their iDevice to the PC/Mac. Or be in for a time consuming lesson.
PS: At the very least one should research the topic themselves. http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/a/Itunes-External-Hard-Drive.htm

How to play/copy a movie from a usb drive in itunes

How do I play/copy a movie from a usb drive in itunes?

Right-click the file icon and choose Open With > iTunes. If the file is compatible, it will start playing.

Running Solaris 11 from a USB drive with persistent changes - possible?

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