I currently make use of a WD 4TB MyBook external USB drive for mybackups. Because my system doesn’t have a USB3 port, I specify a “quirk” to properly handle that drive.
on my parameter line for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT.
I periodically verify the work I do for backing up my wife’s Win11 HP Omnidesk Slim Desktop PC using a
WD 2TB MyPassport external USB drive
I don’t know if I need quirks for that.
Even if there is NO need or availability of a quirk for that device, would it create problems to specify one in GRUB, in case such is available and applicable?
@ericmarceau I don’t have any magic solutions; in your case what you came up with looks creative and appropriate for what your specific situation calls for.
I’ve mentioned before that with antiX Linux (and also with MX Linux), since they share a lot of tools and functions, they have ISO Snapshot tools, distribution remastering, kernel updaters and more.
After I build what I’m looking for I typically create an ISO Snapshot for each of them. After a while, I’ll remaster that snapshot, perhaps doing that a few times, after which I’ll eventually create another newer ISO Snapshot; this back and forth can be repeated indefinitely; the ISO Snapshot is more complete, but unless you have fast backup media it can take quite a while; the bigger the system, the longer it takes, so for MX Linux this can become a pretty big deal, whereas if you keep antiX Linux small and lean, either operation is doable and not terribly lengthy.
Well, without the GRUB quirk, it seems that while trying to perform
du -sh "/diskroot/backupimage"
I got some crazy error which I never saw before about being unable to read the disk, but only after having done that operation twice before for other directories!!!
So I went looking and implemented the case-specific quirk for the above-mentioned 2TB drive,
usb-storage.quirks=1058:25e1:u
(in addition to the other USB-related kernel parameters)
and that did in fact resolve the issue, allowing me to perform the operation without a glitch!
Lesson learned:
ALL WD USB drives likely require the quirk for 100% assured proper operation … and that is fine with me!
YES: the antiX and MX Linux tool is entitled ISO Snapshot, and it’s software that has been crafted and refined collaboratively over the years by those two organizations, but I believe the original came from anticapitalista (a gentleman named Paul Banham in real life, who is a former Brit who lives and works in Thessalonika Greece). https://antixlinux.com/ is the site of the distribution. iso-snapshot is the name of the .deb package in their repository.
It CAN be used to install other ISO images; if the images are NOT antiX or MX Linux they will default to using dd, but it’s easier than dd because it’s a simple GUI program. The dd program is a manual way to transfer ISO images or move bits and bytes from one place to another, but it’s a potentially dangerous tool; it requires you to have root privileges so if you copy something to the wrong place, it can destroy or alter that “place”. Power comes with consequences, so it’s VERY IMPORTANT to use these tools carefully and accurately, with that caution they work quite well.
