> On Jan 28, 2015, at 5:11 PM, spencerone@??? wrote:
> [ …]
> I guess I just don't understand the technical requirements behind installing TAILS using the installer, vs, dragging a ready to run OS onto a portable storage media device. Presuming the OS can't be portable like this [like an application], maybe what I am requesting is having the installer be external.
To summarize the obvious, drag-and-drop by itself can’t fully install an OS on a USB stick because the file-copy mechanism can’t do things like add boot blocks, change partition types, flag partitions as bootable, etc.
It’s theoretically possible to have the file-copy mechanism recognize that dragging a bootable ISO to a USB stick indicates the user’s desire to install the ISO on the stick. That could be used to shift control to something like the livecd-iso-to-disk application, which would work. That operation is both destructive and rare, however, so I wouldn’t support implementing it.
But you suggest something interesting:
> You would drag the .iso onto your portable storage media device then, after restarting your computer, point the boot dialog to the portable storage media device to run the TAILS installer. If this is technically possible, I don't see the need to involve host machine OS file managers, right?
This would be a different way to get a drag-and-drop experience for OS installation, as well as a way to boot multiple OSs from a single storage device… but I can see serious security issues if it’s that easy to get a new OS onto a storage device, and it implies a boot loader that is smart enough to dig into one or more ISO files at each reboot, or at least any new ones, and present them to users as potential candidates for booting.
So I don’t think I like this idea either.
Still interesting, though. I’ll have to think about it some more. Thanks for the suggestion.
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