[S] Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloader?

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Quen
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[S] Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloader?

Post#1 by Quen » 24 Jan 2017, 05:47

Hello everyone, currently I have only one USB with 3.5GB pictures and 1.5GB free space. I have no hard drives nor OS, just the Porteus Live CD and the USB. So - will my pictures get deleted if I install Porteus on the USB as a bootloader? The USB type is FAT and the Porteus version is Xfce 32-bit if it matters. :fool:
Last edited by Quen on 24 Jan 2017, 15:06, edited 1 time in total.

fulalas
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Re: Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloader?

Post#2 by fulalas » 24 Jan 2017, 08:20

No, your pictures will be safe, relax. I also use my USB stick with Porteus and a lot of personal files :good:

Maybe you should format in NTFS, as it can handle 4gb+ files. Also, it supports symlinks, which FAT doesn't.

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Re: Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloader?

Post#3 by Ed_P » 24 Jan 2017, 14:56

An install updates the MBR so if your pictures are important I would make sure you have them backed up somewhere, just in case. I've installed Porteus to 2 USB drives and honestly don't remember if it did a format or not. Both drives are FAT32 and it serves me fine. If you have a need for files larger than 4GB I would recommend a format of exFAT. I would not recommend NTFS which is a journeling format and it's overhead slows down the drive's access times. Not sure if exFAT supports symlinks I've never used them.
Ed

Quen
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Re: Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloader?

Post#4 by Quen » 24 Jan 2017, 15:04

Alright, thanks for the info guys! :D

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Re: [S] Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloa

Post#5 by fulalas » 24 Jan 2017, 20:30

Ed_P, do you have any benchmark supporting that NTFS is indeed slower than FAT or exFAT, specially during an USB stick boot? I found this:

Image

'According to the average benchmark results, which shows a normalized average performance for all types of benchmarks for each file system relative to the FAT32 file system performance, the NTFS file system delivers up to 19% of performance improvements and the exFAT file system delivers up to 7% of performance improvements over the normally used FAT32 file system.' source: http://www.flexense.com/fat32_exfat_ntf ... rison.html

BTW, I think exFAT has a little problem of compatibility: it doesn't work on Windows XP out of the box; only if you install an update. There are also some problems with old consoles, like Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.
Last edited by fulalas on 24 Jan 2017, 22:17, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: [S] Installing Porteus to half-occupied USB as a bootloa

Post#6 by Ed_P » 24 Jan 2017, 21:46

fulalas wrote:Ed_P, do you have any benchmark supporting that NTFS is indeed slower than FAT ou exFAT, specially during a USB stick boot?
Can't say that I do, and whatever I would find would be for the USB drives way before USB 3.0. :D In the early days it was the journeling that was the problem.
Ed

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