Bug 485468

Summary:	Removable Bootable USB
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	eblix08
Component:	grub	Assignee:	Peter Jones <pjones>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	rawhide	CC:	pjones
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2009-05-04 19:12:06 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description eblix08 2009-02-13 17:20:34 UTC

Fedora already supports booting from a USB device but it then mounts that device so it can not be removed.  Since my USB drive is only used for booting I remove it as soon as the computer is booted.  I was wondering if this could be built into Fedora.

Currently I have two boot partitions.  One on my USB drive which is kept on my person for security reasons.  The second is on my LUKS encrypted hard drive partition.

Since I can not (for obvious reasons) boot off a encrypted partition I boot off the USB drive but I mount the boot partition on the encrypted drive.  This allows me to remove my USB drive.

The only gotcha is to keep the two boot partitions in sync which I do manually.  I added a rule to /etc/udev/rules.d that when my bootable USB is connected it will sync the two boot partitions.  This syncing could be automatically done at boot time after the encrypted boot partition is mounted but I have not looked into that.

Comment 1 Jeremy Katz 2009-05-04 19:12:06 UTC

This isn't something that we're going to support out of the box as there are too many ways it can fail if someone doesn't have their usb key plugged in at the right time.