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Booting from USB Drives?

Posted by Cliff on from the yet-another-boot-device dept.

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. booting from pendrive by xFallenAngel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All you need to do is to tell your bios to boot
    from USB, as long as your bios allows this.

    Then just install a system on the pendrive,
    kernel and all, usb support compiled in.
    That should be sufficient. rdev/lilo as needed

    -Fallen