Installing Fedora onto a USB drive

[_V1qY]

Ok so I used pendrive linux to install Fedora onto my USB drive and I can hold down F11 while booting and it will take me into Fedora instead of Windows 7.

But whenever I boot into Fedora it always asks me if I want to install Fedora on my hard drive or just try it out. If I choose to just try it out it works however nothing is saved, EG: my background or the time zone or my WiFi password. And the username is Live Media or something.

How can I install the full version of Fedora onto my USB drive instead of this live demo version thing. Is it possible?

 

[Arras]

Ok so I used pendrive linux to install Fedora onto my USB drive and I can hold down F11 while booting and it will take me into Fedora instead of Windows 7.

But whenever I boot into Fedora it always asks me if I want to install Fedora on my hard drive or just try it out. If I choose to just try it out it works however nothing is saved, EG: my background or the time zone or my WiFi password. And the username is Live Media or something.

How can I install the full version of Fedora onto my USB drive instead of this live demo version thing. Is it possible?

What you did was install the disk image of Fedora onto your USB drive. The effect is the same as if you were booting from a CD, and this is why you can't save anything. Installing a full version of Fedora onto an USB drive is probably possible, although I have never tried it myself. What you probably want to do is do a normal install from disk or a second USB drive, but specify your USB drive as the hard disk to install it to during the partitioning phase. I'll give it a try myself to see if this is possible.
Edit: I can't get a Virtualboxed Fedora to recognize my USB hard drive at all, so no screenshots or anything, sorry.

 

[_V1qY]

Thanks for your help.

Here is what I press in Fedora (I haven't taken screenshots of steps you don't need to see like my password or time zone):

http://filetrip.net/p/18508/21134-Screenshot%20from%2020120929%20131400.png
http://filetrip.net/p/18508/21135-Screenshot%20from%2020120929%20131423.png
http://filetrip.net/p/18508/21136-Screenshot%20from%2020120929%20181544.png

And then I get to this screen:

http://filetrip.net/p/18508/21137-Screenshot%20from%2020120929%20181551.png

And I have no idea what I need to press. I can move the two things on the left to the box on the right but I don't fully understand what is going on and so I stopped because I didn't want to accidently install Fedora on my hard drive.

I'm guessing that the bottom one in the list is my USB drive since it's smaller and the top one is my harddrive.


What do I do next?

 

[Dimensional]

In the left box with the options, the right column tells me all I need to know. sda refers to /dev/sda, which happens to be the internat hard drive you most likely have windows installed on. If you were to select that, and press the right arrow button, you'd be telling the system to install fedora onto that hard drive, and most likely overwriting windows. From the looks of it, you're usb thumb drive is the one that's just about 1GB in size. Fedora requires a bigger drive than that, so I wouldn't recommend you install it on there, as you'd get an installation failure. You'll need a bigger thumb drive, or even a complete USB external Hard Drive, which ranges from $50-$100 for cases that hold between 320GBs and 500GBs. You need 4-8GBs for a working Fedora system to be installed onto a drive.

 

[yusuo]

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

Lets you create a persistent usb drive, you can choose how much of the drive it uses and can save as. I havent tried it with Fedora but it works fine with Ubuntu and allows me to get round all those horrible blocks in college while still saving anything I do and any packages i've downloaded

 

[_V1qY]

I have a 16Gb USB drive which I am going to use. The 1Gb one I was just using as a test to see if it worked first.

I'll try out that link

 

[Dimensional]

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

Lets you create a persistent usb drive, you can choose how much of the drive it uses and can save as. I havent tried it with Fedora but it works fine with Ubuntu and allows me to get round all those horrible blocks in college while still saving anything I do and any packages i've downloaded

However you can't update the persistent image. It would always boot into the first kernel and what was used inside the CD. However, actually installing it to a USB would also cause issues if it were to use a Swap partition, because it would degrade the drive performance over time. Plus the installation would be meant for the hardware configuration of the machine you used to install it on. It will still run on other machines, but it's optimized for that particular machine.

 

[_V1qY]

So I used LilLi USB as reccomended and selected "Persistent drive" and it works! Apart from one small issue, whenenever I boot I always get the "Do you want to install to a hard drive or try Fedora" message which becomes annoying. And that it's limited to 4Gb even though my drive is 16Gb, but that's not too much of an issue.

 

[yusuo]

It will ask you that regardless as its a live usb, no matter what distro you use theres nothing you can do to change that

 

[_V1qY]

Ok so using Fedora on a USB stick is pretty crap.

I now dual boot Linux and Windows. And I'm going to tripple boot to Linux, Windows and Mac soon.