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Booting from USB Drives?

GilesP asks: "With so many USB flash drives around (like the pendrive, Targus Go-Anywhere, and others), and with the demise of the floppy disk, I began to wonder if it would be possible to boot from a USB drive? So your BIOS is going to need to support booting from a USB device, but what else would be involved? I'm primarily thinking about Linux here, but other OSes would be interesting too. These devices come in a range of sizes from 8Mb up to 1Gb, so there is plenty of room to hold a Linux installation. Has anybody done anything like this?"

1 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Need a better bios for most pcs by norwoodites · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Most PC have sh*t bios, they have no concept of booting from any device than the ide bus.

    Intel and AMD should go out and implement an OF base bios then companies could make one card for ia32, ppc, and sparc base machines without writing different bios for the card, they would write in forth.

    There is a project somewhere that is writing an open source base OF bios.