external installation question

[Tim Chase]

On May 30, 2014, aerospace1028 at hotmail.com wrote:
> That was a good reminder about external-drive failure.  I still
> think the trade-offs suit my needs at the moment.

Especially if you're just taking it for a spin rather than doing
anything critical.

> If I understand correctly--once I get everything loaded on the
> external drive and the boot order fixed--with the drive attached to
> my computer, I will have the option to boot into archlinux, and
> with the drive disconnected--while the machine is powered
> off--booting the machine will revert to automatically jumping into
> the factory-installed Windows-7.  The net effect should be similar
> to when I boot the live-CD: without the cd in the tray (or this
> case the external drive plugged into the computer), my computer
> will have no clue there are any other operating systems in
> existance and just go happily on its way? 

That all sounds correct.

Given the light-weight footprint of a Linux install, I've
successfully installed it on a small USB thumb-drive (8 gigs
suffices, and 32 gigs was more than plenty).

If you boot off of the device and shut-down cleanly, you shouldn't
have any problems.  You can also modify your mount-points in
your /etc/fstab to force synchronous writes which will help prevent
corruption but will have a performance impact.  Or you can mount
certain partitions as read-only (particularly /usr as well as your
root/boot partition if you have /home, /tmp, and /var all read/write
as separate partitions) which will help prevent them from getting
corrupted.  Though if you do that, you'd have to remount them
read/write before you did any system upgrades.

-tim