I have an installation of Debian whose boot partition has been placed on an ext2 formatted usb-stick. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that in most situations, the usb-stick should not have to be inserted and mounted. Therefore, I'm planning to remove the usb-stick once the computer has finished booting.In what situations would I have to re-mount the boot partition on the usb-stick and how would I do that correctly? Do I always need to mount in when running apt-get dist-upgrade?
Debian boot partition on USB stick, when and how to mount
debian;boot;usb drive
You need to add noauto option to the /boot line of your etc/fstab, so the system would not try to mount it each time it boots.You need to mount the /boot partition before system updates as the lack of files in their places according to the package manager database may disrupt the booting. For example, updates to grub2 and kernel packages usually trigger the grub2-mkconfig execution apart from installing new files. Of course, if you know for sure that the updates to be installed would not touch /boot or /etc/default/grub (or whatever boot process related config files), then you need not to mount /bootAlso, it could be a good idea to create an udev rule matching your USB stick serial number to prevent it from auto-mounting with regular user credentials if your environment does so by default.