Linux live USB for disk imaging

Claudia Roeck

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Mar 13, 2020, 2:47:55 PM3/13/20

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Hi,

This has probably been asked already. Is there a Bitcurator live USB thumb drive to make disk images, for instance with guymager or the dd command installed? The reason why I'm looking for this is, that I might not want to open a computer and remove the drive, as there is a risk of damaging the electronics inside, especially, if it is a laptop. In addition, there are computers where you cannot access the the hard drive or SSD. For instance, you cannot remove the hard drive of a new MacMini.

I tried the Clonezilla live USB, but it could not handle the internal SSD-drive.

I'm looking forward to hearing your experiences.

Best wishes,

Claudia

Claudia Roeck

University of Amsterdam

Kam Woods

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Mar 13, 2020, 10:20:53 PM3/13/20

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Unfortunately, no. Today, BitCurator is provided only as a standalone installer tool that can be used to create a BitCurator environment in a stock Ubuntu 18.04LTS install, and as a pre-built VM for testing.

If you want a live USB with persistent storage, some imaging tools installed, and the ability to recognize lots of modern hardware, you're better off making one yourself with a recent Ubuntu release. In a relatively small number of steps, you'll have a powerful tool at your disposal that you can modify to your specific needs. There are a number of different way to do this (including using https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb), but the easiest way (as long as you have access to a Windows machine) is described below:

1. Download the latest release of Rufus from https://rufus.ie/. No install is needed - it's simply an executable that runs in Windows.

2. Download the latest daily-live Ubuntu image from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ (or a 19.10 release, or the official 20.04 release when it comes out in April - either way you will need to use something 19.10 or later). Using one of these recent releases will ensure the kernel and supporting libraries are modern enough to recognize a wide range of NVMe, SSD, and integrated storage devices, and allow Rufus to provide persistence configuration (and note - Rufus will not provide a working persistence option for 19.04 and previous releases).

3. Plug a USB 3.0 stick (preferable 16GB or larger) into your Windows box (note - this stick will be wiped in the following steps).

4. Double-click on the Rufus executable. Make sure the USB device you plugged in is selected, and click "SELECT" to pick the Ubuntu ISO you downloaded.

5. You'll see a "Persistent partition size" slider available. Select a size that's something reasonable - 2-4GB should be ok.

6. Click Start to write the image to the USB stick.

You can now use the USB stick you've created to boot to a live system on any machine. Once you're booted to the live desktop, open a terminal and run the following:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install guymager

Once you've installed guymager, you can shut down and it will be available in any future boots from that stick. At the time of writing, it look like the dd package isn't available in 20.04 daily-live, but it probably will be soon and definitely will be by release. If using dd is a necessity use the 19.10 ISO instead.

Kam

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claudia...@gmail.com

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Mar 14, 2020, 12:50:05 PM3/14/20

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Dear Kam

Thank you very much for these useful guidelines. I will apply them.

Best wishes,

Claudia

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David Cirella

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Mar 19, 2020, 4:34:50 PM3/19/20

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Hi,

I have had good experiences running Slax Linux ( https://www.slax.org/introduction.php ) from a USB stick in similar a scenario with a PC laptop. It is a fairly lightweight distribution, uses apt-get for adding software, and can save changes to the USB drive that it is running from. I haven't had tested booting on Apple hardware.

https://www.slax.org/starting.php

Best,
David