I’ve been using a compact SSD USB-stick for some years now. My trusty Kingston DataTraveller. A beasty performer considering it’s a glorified USB-stick. It contains a SSD controller with the flash chips so it functions just like a normal SSD. It gives me about 40-50MB/s read/write speeds. Decent for my needs.

Recently I formatted the stick and started afresh. This post gives a quick rundown of what I did to restore its glory.

First of I made a copy of my main install from my internal SSD;

$ mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/kingston 
$ cp -axr / /mnt/kingston
$ cp -axr /home /mnt/kingston

Remember to use -x to only copy from the locale mount and not other mounted filesystems. -a for archive; preserving attributes, recursive and no de-referencing.

Sometimes you get this gnarly error when trying to install GRUB;

Installing for i386-pc platform.
grub-install: warning: Attempting to install GRUB to a disk with multiple partition labels.  This is not supported yet..
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

Therefore next clear what could be left of GPT or similar on the USB-stick. Making room for GRUB and insuring grub-install works its wonders.

$ parted /dev/sdb
$ mkpart primary ext4 0MiB 1MiB
$ quit

Then, zero the newly created partition.

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb2

Then, delete the partition.

$ parted /dev/sdb
$ rm 2
$ quit

grub-install should now be able to do what it does.

$ grub-install target=i386-pc /dev/sdb
$ grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/kingston/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Verify the generated grub.cfg. And voilá. We’re done. You should be able to boot from the USB-stick now. Remember to use the UUID of the sdb1 partition in your /etc/fstab on the USB-stick to avoid problems.