Pen drives are cheap as dirt nowadays, especially small ones that are like 16GB. I’d just buy a new one.
Yes, they are cheap, but they wear out so fast that they aren’t even worth that little money you put into them.
They wear out if you write data on them, reading doesnt matter. if you just need them for install, you just write once and you can install the same arch on millions of computers
The key to make those cheap drives last a bit longer is by keeping as much free space as possible. For extra shitty drives, just leave half of its space alone (though they might die on their own no matter what you do).
It’s true that you’re often playing the lottery with them, that’s why I just buy a few at a time. Like right now in the US, you can buy 16GB USBs for $4. The last three I’ve bought have lasted over 5 years each, thankfully. But I’ve had ones that have been bad right out of the package. That’s why I just buy from places that have at least 30-day return policies.
Yes, flash memory has limited writes, but what are you doing with your USB drives that they fail? I have at least one from 2005 that still works fine.
The only pendrive that lasted longer than 2 years for me is a 1gb lexar pendrive that is so old that I don’t remember where it comes from, but from google I know that they were sold between 2006-12. I use them for installers, and sometimes to give legally obtained movies to my dad. I might be unlucky, but I had a pendrive that only lasted 2 writes.
You’re forgetting all the fun about taking this challenge as a personal offense and not doing anything else beyond solving it.
I switched to using a NVMe SSD (M.2) in an USB enclosure. Bit larger than a stick but otherwise day and night. Make sure the enclosure chip is Realtek or Asmedia not JMicron.
*cough* netboot
How do I do that?
I was about to edit in a disclaimer about not asking me that because I’ve never used it with Arch and was half joking because it’s probably a huge pain compared to the iso. I’m sure it works well for what it does for those who use it. But I’ve never done it specifically with Arch and you’d need to use Ethernet.
It’s not a huge pain when you have a motherboard with proper UEFI support and some basic EFI shell knowledge. You just need your thumb drive with an FAT32 filesystem, put the netboot EFI binary on it, boot into the shell and execute the binary. You will need a LAN cable for this because WiFi is not supported in UEFI (AFAIK). The netboot binary will download the ISO image into memory and start it right away. An even better solution is to create the path “/EFI/BOOT/” on the thumb drive and rename the netboot binary to “BOOTx64.EFI”, put it into the folder and your BIOS will boot it automatically at startup. If not, you can select it as a valid boot partition in the BIOS menu.
In the game the little guy wins, so you made it work?
Not yet, but the next time I need to reinstall(probably when my new processor arrives), I probably will.
If your phone is rooted you could also build isodrive in Termux to mount any ISO from your phone’s storage
Ventoy be like. P.S good thing tho, thanks for advice, will install tooWell shit, and it even has a pre built magisk module
Aaaand installed lmao
It ain’t gonna fit babe
I lost my 4G drive, it’s in a better place now. It’s been serving me since 2003 even when it lost its case to fit in a USB port on the Xbox 360.
Maybe the new owner of the house I moved out of will find it and the outdated copy of Arch Linux on it.
If they have any sense they’ll not try to find out what’s on it and send it straight to whatever electronics recycling is available.
Sticking a USB device of unknown provenance into your computer is just asking for trouble. (When you think about it, we even take a risk every time we buy one.)
Sure, you know it’s harmless, but they don’t know that, even if you tell them. Who are you? You’re just someone who used to live in their house. As far as they know, you might be a freak who gets a kick out of leaving dodgy devices around for people to find.
deleted by creator
That’s impressive, what brand it is?
deleted by creator
found it on the ground
Checks out
Great things have their start like that, like U.S Cyber Command!
This is the way
It’s okay, they hadn’t invented malware yet
Malware IS the neat part)
Since arch is a rolling release distro, can’t you just download an older iso from when it was below 1gb, install it and then update the system?
Check this page: https://archlinux.org/releng/releases/
Stuff like archinstall might not work, without updating the keyring.
How often has it been used does it still actually have a gigabyte of usable memory
Can you use any sort of compression to fit it? Or just use netboot.xyz
+1 for netboot.xyz
Maybe if you use a file system that supports compression, e.g. btrfs, bcachefs, F2FS, squashfs, or EROFS. Of course, you’d need to add a separate FAT32 EFI System Partition for the bootloader, not sure how to do that.
Use netboot.xyz and let us know how it goes. I’ve always been curious.
I love netboot.xyz. I use it all the time when setting up VPS systems. A lot of KVM-based VPSes have iPXE as a boot option so you can chainload directly into netboot without having to use an ISO.
I prefer installing the OS myself over using any images provided by the provider, so that I know exactly how it was set up.
Netboot.xyz has tools to build your own custom version of it too, with your own options. Useful if you want to host it on an internal server. It’s essentially just a set of iPXE scripts.
I’ve used it a few times, impressive as hell in how simple and effective it is on a small home lab.
Arch has an internet pxe option
Gentoo would fit just fine :P
