Revised version of Remastering HowTo

[Capricorny]

@ Capricorny

You force me to reveal yet another layer of my ignorance.
I think I've done poor man's installs to linux-formatted partitions,
but I thought the rule was NEVER to write linux stuff to ntfs.
Virtual box didn't seem like a violation of that rule.
Kindly point me to some reading material.
Re-formatting was my initial interest; VirtualBox is interesting,
but I can come back to that.

No, I don't think you are ignorant! Conventional wisdom is don't write to NTFS, and for general,unrestricted use, I think that is still the safest advice. But poor man's installs are somewhat simpler than the general case, as just a few files are written, and except for knoppix-data.img, the rest are, mostly, read-only.

I have heard few reports of problems using NTFS this way, and I did my first poor man's install to NTFS/Win7 a few weeks ago - I try to avoid it, but not at any cost. Seems to work very well, and the same method that is used for creating the persistent image can be used for creating a larger volume for working - so you can effectively have two (or more) Linux partitions residing on an NTFS file system.

Again, I would try to minimize writing to NTFS, but for setting up a workplace for remastering, it should be ok. For permanent storage, I would have tried to shrink NTFS to make room for a native Linux partition, but I have no grave objections to using NTFS for a poor man's install - provided there are good back-up routines in place. After all, we only have to take care of one single file, and if the "install" gets corrupted, we just clean up and copy the files to disk once more.

Oh, and I should add: From Win7 viewpoint, cleaning up after such an install is just a matter of normal deletion of a few files. There is a small element of unsafety in that NTFS is mounted rw at /mnt-system - which means you have "automatic" access to all Windows files - also for corrupting them. But as long as you stay within /UNIONFS, there is not much of a danger AFAIK.