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There are no silver-bullet solutions for booting ISOs via USB. A silver-bullet solution requires doing "floppy emulation", which is something that can't be easily done in a general-purpose way. For CD booting, each BIOS has this functionality implemented differently. For USB booting, the bootloader has to figure out how to do this. MEMDISK and GRUB4DOS are the only ones I know that do floppy emulation.

But then you have to do CD drive emulation too.

The way almost all ISO=>USB booters work is to pull the pieces apart and make them work without floppy+CD drive emulation. But this requires intimate knowledge of how that ISO normally boots, and thus it can't be a silver-bullet solution.

We use Cent where I work. There's a special "Server" CD that strips out pretty much everything that's not a major requirement. I think they're taking the same path that Microsoft has with Windows: you put one version on the server, and another version on the client, and it's all tested to work very well together. In that respect, Compiz on the client might be considered a feature.

I think that "Server" CD is something your company created. RedHat split RHEL5 into "Server" and "Client" repositories, but CentOS 5 combined them into a single repository, as CentOS 4 did before. So "Server" or "Client" is just a choice of which packages you install.

Where I work, we've created kickstarts for several configurations - development workstations for a couple different teams, basic server, server with RAID. They're minor differences, and in fact I'm switching our configs to be all generated from one file through gpp. As of last night, you can get a CentOS 5 machine by booting our CD, typing workstation-x86_64 name=foo, and waiting half an hour. At some places, you don't even need to put in a CD - you can use pxelinux to boot off the network.

Maybe there are other free PXE "Pre-OS"es?

Well, you can use PXELinux (part of the whole SysLinux thing) to boot a kernel with a RAM disk (initrd), and run whatever you want from there. You will need a basic live distribution to go in the RAM disk, which contains init, libc.so, sh and whatever other bits you need. You can keep the size down by using busybox. Creating a working initrd can be a little hairy, as your compile-time paths are normally different than the runtime ones, which can break some programs without a little hacking. The initrd itself is a gzip'd cpio archive. You then have to set up a TFTP server for serving PXELinux; if you want to automate things, you can have your DHCP server tell PXE-capable clients to boot PXELinux from your TFTP server.

If you are in the market for a commercial solution, with centralised management and all the trimmings, you should get NetInstall v6 from enteo software with OSD (OS deployment); this includes TrueImage. It costs money, but it works very well. It's a primarily PC/Windows solution, however, so imaging to/from a Mac may well not work.

-- Steve

You can use a USB floppy drive.

Also, there are ways of booting a floppy disk image from grub/lilo (I use memdisk). This is my preferred method for BIOS upgrades on HP DL145s. Of course, you still need a floppy drive on a Windows PC to get the floppy image because HP only distributes a stupid DOS app that creates an actual floppy disk...

BTW, HP's DL3xx series are much nicer and support niceties like online BIOS upgrades which you can do from within Linux. No mucking about with floppies or DOS needed.

My USB drive is filled with bootable images for syslinux, you can load kernels and boot floppy / harddisk images using memdisk. I partitioned my USB drive as a ZIP drive for improved BIOS booting. I currently have different Fedora kickstart options, a Fedora Rescue, Gentoo LiveUSB, memdisk86, Seagate Discwizard and Dell Diagnostics.

My USB drive is filled with bootable images for syslinux, you can load kernels and boot floppy / harddisk images using memdisk. I partitioned my USB drive as a ZIP drive for improved BIOS booting. I currently have different Fedora kickstart options, a Fedora Rescue, Gentoo LiveUSB, memdisk86, Seagate Discwizard and Dell Diagnostics.

GAG (graphical)

Gujin

Syslinux

i use grub to have a smart boot manager image as a boot option, that way i don't have to mess with the bios of my laptop if i want to boot from cd, i leave the bios set to boot from hard disk. using memdisk i can boot floppy images.
to do this use smart boot manager on a floppy, configure it to autoboot from cdrom, save the config back to the floppy, then save that floppy image and get grub to boot it when you select 'cdrom' from the grub boot menu, as far as i know lilo won't boot a floppy image or memdisk, i also have an option in grub to boot the 2.8mb tomsrtbt image as an emergency tool,
my menu.lst looks like this (note, in the article this file seemed to be called grub.conf):
blah blah
usual stuff

###snake's extras
title cdrom
kernel(hd0,1)/memdisk
initrd (hd0,1)/sbm.img

title tomsrootboot
kernel (hd0,1)/memdisk
initrd (hd0,1)/tomsrtbt.img

(hd0,1) is my /boot partition in which i put the tomsrtboot floppy image, the smart boot manager flopppy image as well as memdisk which i found at http://syslinux.zytor.com/

very useful

snake

Anyone tried Syslinux to compare with?

Or even better

Use memdisk from syslinux to boot the floppy image directly from grub or so.

smbinst.exe -d 0

with a clean, formatted floppy in the drive - which should install the smart boot manager to the floppy.

Set your BIOS to boot from the floppy first if necessary, and you should then get the smart boot manager menu - one option of which is to boot the cdrom.

The advantage of doing all this is that it bypasses your crappy computer BIOS, and uses the loader on the floppy instead to boot the CDROM.

By using the bootmanager floppy to boot your knoppix CD, you should be able to boot knoppix, mount your windows drive, and copy all your files to another hard-drive or network share.

Try memdisk
It allows you to boot floppy or harddrive images from grub.

I have just been putting a new machine together using a SATA drive as the primary and no floppy. Only after plugging the lot in for the first time I discovered the slackware install CDROM would not talk SATA. Rather than burn another boot CD I used a USB CF reader and card.

Take a look at syslinux for more information on making a flash (or any FAT) drive boot a linux image. Makes life much easier if your kernels are too big for a floppy.

Indeed, and you could use MEMDISK to implement such RAM disk which would be bootable from CD. Maybe if you can rig memdisk to uncompress its ramdisk image using bzip2 or upx, you might even succeed in putting the whole Windows on one single (XDF) floppy ;)

Syslinux will get you far on these 'toys'. I have a couple of them (and they seem to be multiplying). The smaller ones I use as combo 95/98 boot disks and have them booting kernels that will nfs mount root off one of my other boxes. Lets me turn a spare box into a quick linux box or a place to sys a couple new 98 style boot disks. Syslinux is your friend and it *will* work on most of these thumb drives. The hard part in getting these to boot is usually getting your mainboard to actually do it (lots claim they do, but you'll need luck actually making the marketing come true)

check out superrescue

I guess using that as a base, it wouldn't be too hard to create a bsd system or other.

If you still want to create your own system from scratch, isolinux is helpful. It takes care of the booting. The only other thing you would have to manage is to mount a ramdisk for /var and maybe /etc (anything that needs rw).

have fun :)

who is this guy: hpa@transmeta.com (H. Peter Anvin) and why is he posting here (http://www.phoaks.com/comp/std/c++/, search for 'transmeta' in your web browser.) He has a @transmeta address ... why? here's his personal page; http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/