Arch from hdd to usb-stick?

Question

Hi all.
After installing and playing with Arch on a normal desktop computer I have the required functionality and it work very well. But i'm struggling with how i should make the USB stick based on the installation i already have.
root ~ # df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs           15G  1.9G   12G  14% /
dev             2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev
run             2.0G  264K  2.0G   1% /run
/dev/sda2        15G  1.9G   12G  14% /
shm             2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           2.0G  4.0K  2.0G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda4       442G  222M  420G   1% /home
/dev/sda1       471M   30M  417M   7% /boot
this should fit on a 4gb USB disk without any problems. I dont think there is any reason to use more than one partition on the usb-stick so my plan was to rsync the root of my hdd to the USB stick, update the fstab, chroot to the usbstick and reinstall syslinux. But i cant get this to work.
So how would you make a live-usb-stick from an existing installation?
Last edited by sptz (2012-10-26 11:20:57)

Answer 1

thank you, you guys rock! brain0 was spot on, I had forgotten the mkinitcpio stuff! Now everything works.
I didn't use the UUID format, and used the /dev/sda1 instead, but thats easy to change. i was of the impression that the UUID was tied to the hardware device, but is it actually just the filesystem? So if i dd the usb-stick to another stick the UUID will still be correct?
(and then i forgot to push the submit button, so in the meantime i found the documentation in the arch wiki. UUID is the identifier for the file-system so I guess moving it to different hardware shouldn't be a problem)
For future reference:
fdisk <blablabla>
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/dest
rsync -avP /home/usb_backup1/ /mnt/dest/
lsblk -f
vim /mnt/dest/etc/fstab
mount -t proc none /mnt/dest/proc
mount --rbind /dev /mnt/dest/dev
mount --rbind /sys /mnt/dest/sys
mount --rbind /run /mnt/dest/run
mount --rbind /tmp /mnt/dest/tmp
chroot /mnt/dest /bin/bash
source /etc/profile
vim /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
mkinitcpio -p linux
syslinux-install_update -ami
vim /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg
reboot
boot into USB device
Last edited by sptz (2012-10-24 13:54:14)