Replacing Rescue CDs with USB Keys?

Dan asks: "For several years now I have been working on the ultimate rescue CD, being able to load many disk images, Windows XP PE, all from CDROM while having a nice graphical menu as the main interface during bootup (I would post a nice screenshot, but I like my bandwidth) and I mainly used the ISOLINUX bootloader. I recently received a SanDisk Mini Cruzer 256 USB 2.0 keychain drive, and I am really eager to put some sort of multi booting system on my USB key drive to achieve the same goal. I haven't seen anyone having any success with ISOLINUX or something similar, but the drive is bootable for sure. I have exhausted all options, I searched, I posted on many forums, I never get any useful replies. Since Slashdot readers mostly share the same interests, I am hoping you guys can help me out!" How would yo u configure a USB Key drive to boot multiple operating systems?

Comments

Have you tried

[b00m3rang]

Ghosting from your CD to the USB dongle?

Re:Have you tried

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to boot from CF (but not USB) do what I do and use a PCEngines IDE/CF adapter with a fat glob of Marine-Tex epoxy over the delicate bits.
The BIOS will see it as a hard disk. :)
In case the BIOS reports it incorrectly, download ideinfo.exe from
http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/

Re:Have you tried

[riprjak]

Pah! a *real* programmer would hack together a hex input device and punch in the bootloader op-codes from memory ;)

Worth a Shot

[luigi22_]

Just treat it like you would a CD. But don't put it in your burner, unless you like fried USB.

You lose compatibility

[TheRealMindChild]

With the advent of bootable CDs, everyone cried "Throw away the floppy, you dont need it for anything!", that is until they came across their mothers busted 10 year old packard bell. Now you propose to do the same thing to cds with the promise of a usb key. Seeing that your computer not only needs to support USB AND be able to boot from USB. The range of computers you can do this is MUCH less then that which can boot from a cdrom which is MUCH LESS then the computers that can boot from floppies.

Re:You lose compatibility

[Chasuk]

Except that an increasing number of PC's don't come with floppy drives, thank goodness. I haven't sold a laptop with a floppy drive in months, and when I ask cusomers whether they want a floppy drive installed in the new computer we are assembling, most say:

"Whatever for?"

I can never give them a good reason. If you need a floppy drive, you generally KNOW that you need one. A box of floppy disks costs approximately $5, and holds 1/60th or less the quantity of data of a single CD, which costs less and is nearly as convenient.

I sell a HUGE number of USB pen drives and people need zero coaxing. They are attractive in every category save price, but they are still affordable enough that we sell them by the case. We've sold them as door prizes to frat houses holding parties, for christ sake, and no one was puzzled as to their purpose.

Sure, if you have a piece of shite suitable for nothing but answering your e-mail, a machine of the antiquity for which a floppy drive was a necessity, then a boot floppy is a good idea. However, those machines are expiring dinosaurs whose remains we frequenlty discover in the dumpster behind my place of business (I work at a large computer retailer).

The Good Will doesn't even want them, nor any of the other charities that used to give them homes.

I, for one, look forward to the rule of the floppy-driveless uber-machines.

Re:You lose compatibility

[AKnightCowboy]

I haven't sold a laptop with a floppy drive in months, and when I ask cusomers whether they want a floppy drive installed in the new computer we are assembling, most say: "Whatever for?"

Upgrading your BIOS? I know that's even becoming an obsolete reason with online updates to the flash bios from motherboard makers like MSI. Run a Windows app, flash the bios, reboot and voila. I suppose you could also create a bootable CD with the image on it. Programming classes at schools also like getting floppy disks. All my professors insisted on floppy disks even when I suggested a CD would be cheaper for me since I'd probably never see it again. Nope, they want a floppy disk.

Re:You lose compatibility

[TheRealMindChild]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! THE HUMANITY! Perfectly good PCs being thrown out...

I would disown family members for that

Re:You lose compatibility

[addaon]

Where the heck did you go to school? You say professor, so I assume you're not talking about high school or anything... why would you ever hand in a physical floppy, cd, or whatever? Why not just use electronic submission?

Re:You lose compatibility

[Txiasaeia]

"You say professor, so I assume you're not talking about high school or anything... why would you ever hand in a physical floppy, cd, or whatever?"

One of my profs required us to hand in a floppy disk with the assignment on it along with the paper copy. Never gave us a reason, though I suspect it had something to do with the Turnitin service. As to why they didn't want electronic submissions, who knows? Profs are wacky people.

Re:You lose compatibility

[0x0d0a]

Okay, laptops are a special case. Size and space are a *premium*, and a 3.5" square is a pretty big deal.

On desktops, I don't believe the OEMs are generally shipping floppyless computers (I haven't been looking, but I haven't heard anything about it) other than Apple. Apple (a) likes to make press waves about being forward-looking and (b) doesn't have some PC hardware architecture cruft where booting from floppies is still a significant benefit.

Re:You lose compatibility

[gmhowell]

I just ordered a Dell for my mother (and order a half dozen a couple of months ago for work) and in about 50% of the machines I looked at, a floppy drive was an optional extra.

Re:You lose compatibility

[SpaceLifeForm]

Sorry, but if your idea of an uber-machine is to be sans floppy, then all you/they really want is a network
computer/appliance - not a true general purpose machine. The general public has no idea why they
would want a floppy because they rarely if ever
use a floppy.

But the reality is, they really
are damn handy. Where else can you take a *writable and bootable medium* (WBM)
and boot it on machine 'A', modify files on the
same WBM on 'A', then boot the same WBM on
machine 'B', and have it self-diagnose/repair on machine 'B', writing results to said WBM, and then
removing the WBM from 'B', booting same WBM on machine 'A', and reviewing
diagnostic results on said WBM? All in 5 minutes or less?

Re:You lose compatibility

[n()_cHIEFz]

they are still affordable enough that we sell them by the case. We've sold them as door prizes to frat houses holding parties, for christ sake, and no one was puzzled as to their purpose.

I'm guessing that the tri-delts were the ones that didn't know what the USB drives were?

Re:You lose compatibility

[arcade]

You are aware that some people don't like to be contacted electronically? :)

For a good example. Try Donald Knuth.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email. ht ml

Re:You lose compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

We mustn't upset the delicate genius! This kind of stuff really makes me happy that he is old enough to die. And yes I know someday I will be crufty and outdated I hope someone has the gall to say the same thing about me. Listen, there is no excuse for seclusion outside of the need to be a recluse. If you are a recluse, I have no problem with that, unless you also insist that I kiss you ass and attempt to learn something from you. Professors jobs are to teach, not to be insane recluses.

Now for the short answer to your sadly simple problem, if you have a prof that requires floppies(die cruft die!), just use one of your schools more than outdated computers that are readily equipted with both email and a floppy drive....problem solved!

Sorry for the rant I just hate delicate geniuses. Anyone that delicate isn't a genius they are an intelligent asshole.

Re:You lose compatibility

[WillAdams]

Apparently you don't understand why Dr. Knuth needs his time --- he's _got_ to finish writing _The Art of Computer Programming_ before he passes away (and still keep up w/ errata for his books, other books he needs to write and the odd TeX update).

In case you're not familiar w/ TAoCP, when he was first asked about writing it, he knocked out ~600 pages of manuscript for the first chapter and submitted that --- his editor then asked in a humble and subdued voice, ``Don, just how long is this book going to be?'' (That first chapter then became most of Volume 1).

He's running behind on it, 'cause publishing changed from hot metal type to digital typesetting and the early systems were either clunky or awful (Penta wasn't too bad, but it was expensive, proprietary and there wasn't a reasonable means for authors to provide input). Dr. Knuth then saw it as his observation to provide a good solution to this (he thought he'd be finished over an up-coming sabbatical, ~20 yrs. and three versions / re-writes later we had TeX _and_ his ``Literate Programming'' system).

Lest you think TeX is moribund, its H&J (with extensions developed by URW w/ Prof. Hermann Zapf, their ``HZ'' system) is used as the basis for Adobe's InDesign page layout program. TeX then got much of these capabilities when Han The Thanh created pdfTeX (his studies were in part funded by Adobe Systems). In addition to pdfTeX there're Omega (Unicode-aware variant), e-TeX (more registers &c. needed for modern formats), Aleph (blending of the two) as well as NTS &c.

In addition to Plain TeX, LaTeX and TeXinfo (you may know the latter better as the basis for GNU's documentation format) there're new systems such as Hans Hagen's ConTeXt, Lollipop &c., as well as way cool extensions to LaTeX such as Memoir (v1.6 was just announced), Komascript (typesetting to the standards Jan Tschichold upheld at Penguin Books), NCC-LaTeX and enough more to almost fill a _DVD_ w/ free software and support tools. Plus Frank Mittelbach's second edition of _The LaTeX Companion_ is almost done, after which he'll be freed up to work on LaTeX3.

And all that came from a small detour in his writing of TAoCP --- the text itself is just as important.

William

Re:You lose compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

gee i guess you, your family and friends will be first in line when your told you need to take the mark "666" because money and crdit/smart cards are obsolete... but your so sure of yourself you want have to worry... you think it won`t happen.....

Re:You lose compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for that. Insightful, informative and interesting.

Re:You lose compatibility

[farnz]

Oddly enough, in my little area of the world, there's three x86 boxes, all of which will boot off a USB key (and make it writable from DOS). Now, if I had older x86 hardware that wouldn't boot from a USB key, I'd need floppies; as it is, I can get by fine with a bootable USB key.

Re:You lose compatibility

[Muad'Dave]

Yep - I've done it, and it worked great! I made an El-Torito image of a DOS bootable floppy, and put the flash program and image on the CD. It sure beats the "Rrrr...Rrrr...Rrrr" sound of a bad sector on a floppy.

Re:You lose compatibility

[Dogtanian]

I just ordered a Dell... in about 50% of the machines I looked at, a floppy drive was an optional extra.

Saves Dell a few dollars on something few think that they want, and gives them an excuse to charge much more than the going rate for it as an "extra"; this must be how Dell makes a lot of their money- take basic stuff, repackage as "upgrades" at inflated prices.

Re:You lose compatibility

[DaHat]

I too had several programming classes like this, both paper and floppy (although a zip was acceptable). The idea was that the professor could quickly go through the stack of floppies while at their computer to verify that the program ran correctly, and then have their TA (or themselves) go over the code with a fine tooth comb (at times) anywhere else and verify it's correctness to the rules.

Re:You lose compatibility

[gmhowell]

$19, which is very close to what the local shops charge for a loose drive.

I tried this...

[doublebackslash]

Getting a kernel or anything to boot off of a usb key is a pain in places that I didn't even know i had places. The hardware has to have a system in place to map the usb dongle to a hard drive (like the hard drive image on a cdrom) or it's going to be a battle for you that i have yet to win, even loading the initrd.img (INItial Ram Disk compressed with gzip) from a floppy.
I will admit that better men than me have tried and succeded, but not without sacrificing simplicity to verry angry gods of madness.
if your hardware will not support mapping a usb anything to a hard drive/floppy drive like interface that the boot-loader can understand, I wish you luck. But if you can pull it off, look into the initrd.img, that can teach you a lot about the booting process of linux, and you may be able to get a fast booting rescue system rolled to your strict specs (its nice, believe me, long pain in the whatever, but nice)(Also there is an option in RedHat's initrd.img that keeps the kernel option from forcing the kernel to boot from the specified hard drive btw. I forget where it is, but its one of the scripts, it sticks out after you see it, I fixed mine ;).
Once you get a kernel to boot up and dump you into a basic shell, look at this.
Lots of usefull info on making a nice live system. The info on cds ought to translate pretty well to usb, it did for me.
Good luck.
Peace, Love, and [paying] Rent. Pick two.

I'll Make it work

[bluGill]

Part of the problem is booting from USB is still new relative to booting from CDs. (Or do you forget how long between the appearance of CDs, and good support for booting from them took?) Either wait a few years for programers to work out the bugs, or work them out yourself. You can offer bonties in various places to encourage people to do the work if you can't do it yourself.

However, since I'm unemployed I'll do the work of making open source tools work (Microsoft has to support booting from usb before I will guarantee it will work) if you give me a working computer that can boot from USB (mine won't, too old), and a USB key to boot from.

Re:I'll Make it work

[DA-MAN]

However, since I'm unemployed I'll do the work of making open source tools work (Microsoft has to support booting from usb before I will guarantee it will work) if you give me a working computer that can boot from USB (mine won't, too old), and a USB key to boot from.

I can see why you're unemployed. Repeat after me, Microsoft is not a BIOS manufacturer...

Re:I'll Make it work

[bluGill]

I hope with your holy-er than thou attitude you are also unemployed, but because in your hurry to flame me you completely ignored one issue of booting.

If Microsoft's USB drivers don't support booting from USB it doesn't matter what your BIOS supports. I'm not sure how windows boots, but I know that OS/2 which is similar in some ways has a separate boot driver that loads the OS and then the main driver has code to take over, if those pieces are not written there is no chance of booting from USB. (You could write your own drivers, but I'd don't own the tools to do that)

Again, I don't know if Microsoft has done the work to make sure their drivers support booting from USB. I know that many BIOS do not. (though this may be mostly historical, if current ones seem to support it)

Re:I'll Make it work

[DA-MAN]

Ok, let me spell this out to you.

When the BIOS supports USB Mass Storage Booting, it is seen as a legacy device (hard drive), much like the El Torito standard allows emulation of a floppy drive on the cd.

DOS predates USB, but DOS can be booted off of a USB Key.

This is why I had no problems flaming you, you didn't know what was involved yet was volunteering to do it.

Re:I'll Make it work

[bluGill]

My comment still stands, because when windows takes over it will installs its own USB drivers. unless you are going to try to convince me that in this day and age windows XP uses BIOS to address diskdrives? I don't think so, windows 95 maybe, but XP has moved byond such backward ways of working. So if the drivers are not coded right, it gets to the point in the boot process where it starts loading USB drivers, and things fail because the disk has not been reset, or there are two filesystems trying to work on it or whatever. Do not compare DOS, which uses the BIOS for disk access with a modern OS which bypasses that old way of doing things.

Linux is open source, I can make it work if the closed source hardware will do its part. I don't have to know how everything works yet, because the first part of making it work is finding out how it is supposed to work.

Re:I'll Make it work

[DA-MAN]

Two things I would like to point out.

1) I apologize for the being unemployed crap. I was there too, for a very long time. Sorry.
2) We weren't talking about Windows booting off of a USB, we were originally talking about Linux. I have had no issues booting either off of my USB hard drive.

Linux treats the USB drive as a scsi drive. This mean's that you use the initrd to boot and it will then remount after the kernel takes over from the bios. No additional work should be nessecary.

Microsoft also is installed on my USB hard drive, I'm not entirely sure how that works but I can only assume that it treat's the hard drive in a similar capacity. Making all this discussion a moot point.

Re:I'll Make it work

[bluGill]

As I don't have a system that can boot from USB I have to work with what I know. I know that if linux doesn't work I can make it work.

Linux does not treat USB as a SCSI disk, usb is a SCSI disk. The USB (and 1394) people made the decision to not create a new protocol, instead they reused the scsi command set. So a USB disk is SCSI. (In a previous job I was working with USB cddrom drives, so I know how USB works in general)

Your right though, if it already works I guess I'll have to find a different way to get a job. No big surprize, I didn't expect to find a job based on that post anyway.

Re:I'll Make it work

[DA-MAN]

Linux does not treat USB as a SCSI disk, usb is a SCSI disk.

Mine is a 40 GB Laptop IDE disk in a USB Enclosure. I realize the enclosure communicates with my system using the SCSI protocol. Although for all practical purposes you are right....

The best advantage of CD...

[FreshMeat-BWG]

It is the same each time I boot. The initial ramdisk is loaded from the CD and I can do anything I want while booted from the CD (even 'rm -rf /') and I know that my system will boot to the CD next time just as well as last time.

Although now that I think of it...many keychain drives have a write-protect switch on them. That could be useful!

Re:The best advantage of CD...

[kayen_telva]

wherefore art thou MODS ? not even remotely on topic

Intriguing, but not widely supported

[lambent]

The posts so far have been right on the money: boot from usb device, while several years old, is not as common as we would like it to be.

Perhaps the best you can hope for (certainly the easiest) is to make a linux bootable diskette, load USB drivers from there, then mount the usb-drive, and load a new kernel from that. Two stage boot.

Re:Intriguing, but not widely supported

[SpaceLifeForm]

Yes, sounds workable with kexec.

Shuttle Cube systems

[jotaeleemeese]

They claim to boot from USB (I was reading their manual and the BIOS is supossed to boot from USB disks, a flash memory key should appear as nothing but a disk).

I may be worth getting in touch with them to explore this.

Re:Shuttle Cube systems

[omarius]

I was about to reply, it sounds like it would be a major pain w/o BIOS support for it. With, though, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

You coul of course,

[Gleapsite]

You could of course boot from a floppy/CD [wherein you have USB drivers, and some sort of program like Norton Ghost on it]

Now you just load the images from the USB key. you get the image files, at least with ghost, by the same method only saving the file.

I have used this at work to store the images of different workstations, (windows 98, NT, 2000, XP) which in case of a hard drive going bad, which happens far too often with Dell provided W*stern Digital drives, I can just replace the drive, hook up my USB and disk and go.

Now to boot multiple Operating systems from a USB key could be done the same way, by using a Floppy which installs your drivers, after this you'd have to write something to refer to a menu to choose your operating system.

Its just a thought on getting to your USB, after that I have no idea how you could get seperate OS's to boot, though i'm sure someone out there does.

-Clint
--

treat it as if it were a CD

[morelife]

you'll have to burn an el torito bootable image and then dd it to the boot sector of the USB. You can make partitions in the key for each OS. Grub can be the boot loader, but you'll have to set up the OS images on a separate PC as if they were the principal image, then dd/copy them to the appropriate partition on the USB key.

So long as your bios allows boot from the USB device it should think it's a CDROM with the eltorito image.

This is a lot of work man. The requirement of graphical interface in there makes it all the more complicated. And not too many people on the planet will realize how unbelievably cool you really are when and if you get it working.

Re:treat it as if it were a CD

[AKnightCowboy]

This is a lot of work man. The requirement of graphical interface in there makes it all the more complicated. And not too many people on the planet will realize how unbelievably cool you really are when and if you get it working.

I don't really understand what the purpose of this is. If he's already got this all setup with CDs, why bother with much more expensive USB key disks that hold less stuff? The closest key drive to a CD would be a 512MB one and last time I checked they were over $100. Just burn a ten cent CD-RW image and be done with it.

Re:treat it as if it were a CD

[gl4ss]

have you ever compared the size and fragility of a cd against an usb memory-key? some usb memories fit well into a keychain, while cd's have hard time fitting in a pocket.

Re:treat it as if it were a CD

[Dogtanian]

cd's have hard time fitting in a pocket.

8cm mini-CDs.

Fit almost any CD drive since the late 80s (yeah, the format *has* been around that long).

Hold 210MB.

Plus.... interesting talking point as they look "cute".

Firewire drives

[Anonymous Coward]

The Good:

1) Large Capacity, can hold all your favorite tools.
2) Writable, so you can get your data off.
3) 'Free' when you buy a certain brand of music player.

The Bad:

1) You need a computer that knows how to boot from Firewire
2) Costs a lot more then a CD-R or DVD-R blank.

Re:Firewire drives

[notsoclever]

By 'certain brand' I assume you mean an iPod... iPods also support USB2 now. But I don't know if it can be used as a boot volume. Even as a firewire drive I think it can only be used to boot MacOS (because of the flexibility in the MacOS OpenFirmware bootloader).

floppy still has a use

[Nerdy]

My raid card comes with the drivers on a floppy. Until I figure out how to tell windows xp installation to load them from a cd or hard drive, I have to use the floppy when I reinstall.

Re:floppy still has a use

[Anonymous Coward]

READ THE BOOT SCREENS

yes... im yelling...

Thats the problem with todays computer users... they dont read what the computer is telling them....

[during the install process it asks you if there are any third party drivers to be installed......]

Re:floppy still has a use

[Blkdeath]

Thats the problem with todays computer users... they dont read what the computer is telling them....

[during the install process it asks you if there are any third party drivers to be installed......]

Whereupon it prompts you for the FLOPPY (yes, I'm yelling) containing said drivers.

booting linux from pendrive

[Verence]

Gentoo forums thread titled "Booting Linux from a USB Pendrive"

---
Ever been in the situation where you wanted to flash your BIOS only to find out you ran all out of (working) floppy's, or you didn't have a windows bootdisk at hand, or even worse, you didn't have a (working) floppy drive?
---
At least it's a start.

Re:booting linux from pendrive

[0x0d0a]

Ever been in the situation where you wanted to flash your BIOS only to find out you ran all out of (working) floppy's, or you didn't have a windows bootdisk at hand, or even worse, you didn't have a (working) floppy drive?

You too? I'll go one better -- my darn-I-don't-have-a-floppy experience was on a dorm floor at Carnegie Mellon University (i.e. CS geek central) and I couldn't find anyone on the floor with a working 3.5" floppy disk to use. I had to run down to the campus computer store to buy floppies. Ah, AOL floppies, how we miss you...

Re:booting linux from pendrive

[drsmithy]

Ever been in the situation where you wanted to flash your BIOS only to find out you ran all out of (working) floppy's, or you didn't have a windows bootdisk at hand, or even worse, you didn't have a (working) floppy drive?

Yep. I went to www.bootdisk.com and grabbed a bootable floppy image, copied the necessary files to update the BIOS into it and then wrote it as the boot image of a bootable CD.

Screw that!

[Brandybuck]

Screw that! I haven't even gotten past the first step of getting the system to even recognize the USB device on bootup. The BIOS says bootable USB is enabled, but there's nowhere to specify it as the first boot device, and it's never accessed.

All these people saying the floppy is dead because you can boot from your USB thumb drive are blowing smoke out their ass. I seriously don't think it can be done.

My notes on a bootable USB drive

[jshare]

What follows are some quick notes on making the USB keychains bootable (the bios must support booting from USB).

You need a bootable MBR on the device itself, and then some sort of bootloader on the partition.

I used a windows utility I found to put an MBR (it uses Freedos) onto the keychain. I then used syslinux as the bootloader, and was able to boot multiple floppy images, etc. Additionally, under the dos image, I was able to access the USB keychain as the C: drive (but this may be BIOS dependent).

Syslinux is nice because you can boot both floppy images and linux kernels/initrds. The configuration is almost identical to the configuration of PXElinux (which we use to boot the testlab). Also, making changes to the booting (adding another firmware floppy, etc.) is trivial, because you just copy the floppy image to the keychain (which is still a FAT filesystem) and optionally edit the config file to make an easy name to boot it.

Steps to make keychain bootable:

* put MBR onto keychain (with this utility I found, or probably install-mbr under linux)
* run syslinux, pointing it at the first (and probably only) partition of the keychain
* configure the syslinux.cfg file, add floppy images & memdisk "kernel", add other material to the keychain

Steps to boot from the keychain:

* put the keychain in the system
* boot the system and go into the bios
* configure the BIOS to boot from the USB hard drive. Sometimes this is tricky. It may show up in the "Hard Drives" section (where you must make it the first drive on the list). It may just show up in the bootable devices section, just as NICs do, and the LSI MegaRAID (or other RAID) cards do.
* save the settings and exit
* boot to the keychain, select your syslinux option, boot the machine
* if you boot the machine without the keychain in it, you will have to reset the BIOS the next time you want to boot to the keychain again. (This is definitely true on the beta hardware, other hardware has not been tested.)

That's pretty much it. I believe that the debian utility "install-mbr" would also put an MBR onto the keychain (often /dev/sda), but I've not tried it.

I have booted a linux kernel and initrd from the pendrive.

I really think that syslinux is the way to go, since you keep a fat partition, which every OS can write to, and you just edit a text file to make an easy boot menu. I've used this USB drive for flashing firmware, booting up to an unattended windows install ( http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ ), running memtest86.

The USB drive rules. If I ever have to give it back to my work (it's only 64MB, so they probably don't really care), then I'm totally buying one.

I did it using grub

[JeffL]

I boot my usb key drive using grub. As long as the PC has BIOS support for booting a USB device, it should work:

1. Make the usb key work under Linux, plug it in so it is /dev/sda1 (for example)
2. copy the grub stuff out of /boot/grub to /boot/grub on the key
3. run grup --no-floppy
4. in grub type device (hd0) /dev/sda
5. then root (hd0,0) grub should say it found a fat filesystem
6. then install (hd0) and grub should do its thing
7. now you can boot from your usb key with grub

of course now you have to put things on the key to be booted. Using memdisk from syslinux is convenient to boot floppy images. My menu.lst looks something like:

title Memtest86+
kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memtestv100.bin

title IBM/Hitachi Disk Fitness Test 3.50
kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/dftv350.bin

title Western Digital DLG Diag Ver. 11
kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/wdlifeguard.img

and so on. I'm not booting a full rescue image from the key, mostly just disk images.

Re:I did it using grub

[JeffL]

Oops, step 6 should be setup (hd0)

Re:I did it using grub

[agristin]

Nice! This is what I was thinking...

-A

Smart BootManager

[Cecil]

Smart BootManager is a personal favourite bootloader for me. My favourite feature is probably useless for what you intend to do, but if you stick it on a floppy, it will let you boot from the CDROM of a computer ancient enough that it doesn't normally support CDROM booting. This has saved me from pulling out my hair numerous times to boot, say, a Windows install CD, or a Debian install CD, or whatever you may need to install that is too big to fit on a disk or USB drive.

It has a nice asciigraphic menu, is completely runtime-configurable, and fits in 30kB. Really impressive, in my opinion. If you can partition your USB drive in a way that it understands, it should be able to do what you want.

USB Rom?

[SkewlD00d]

What about developing a low-cost, one-time-programmable (OTP, probably a fuse-map via strobing rows & cols) USB, and maybe Firewire, ROM single-chip solution? Could this be made cheaper than a CD (and all the support equipement)? One single chip could replace the entire CD manufacturing process with a unversal, solid-state OTP media than could hold anything from an OS, apps, etc. Just think, a chip could be "burned" from a kiosk containing software/songs/etc., or replace CD-Rs.

Re:USB Rom?

[Neo-Rio-101]

Yeah, just imagine that. Windows XP running from Kernel ROM.... Just like a Commodore 64!

At least it will make Windows a little less vulnerable to viruses.

Re:USB Rom?

[SkewlD00d]

Programs on encrypted USB rom carts? What about having all programs (but maybe not data) reside on a card (not copied to a computer)? If you want a program, you have to buy it and plug it in. And if you want to uninstall it, just remove it. =D It's sure is low-tech, but that wouldn't that stop most pirating? Product activation and typing in long serialz is a waste of time and effort.

Ghosting to USB Key

[Geccie]

Do not ghost to a flash USB device. I think that the repetitive rewriting of the directory information will burn the directory portion of the disk. Make a ghost image, then copy it to the flash disk. Supposedly, ghost 8 supports usb devices. Also, a co-worker of mine has had problems copying between usb hdds. He has to copy from usb hdd1 to local drive then to usb hdd2. - Geccie

Some comments about the replies (I'm the author)

[xplosiv]

Many people suggest to stick with my CD, which I will, the reason I want to use my usb keychain (which I got for Christmas) drive is because I have it always on me, it's so tiny, doesn't push my wallet to its physical limits, and most of the systems I have or work on support USB booting.

Here. is a screenshot of the current CD (since this ask slashdot didn't get posted on the front page unfortunately, I can post the screenshot now). I did notice some replies have some really good instructions, I will be trying these for sure, currently the trick to get my USB stick to boot was by formatting it using regular FAT, not fat32, then it showed up in dos when I booted with a dos disk, allowing me to 'sys' it (SanDisk wrote me explaining this device isn't bootable when I submitted a trouble ticket for this!).

I know it's only a 256 meg stick, but you wouldn't believe how useful this thing has been, I have hundreds of single exe apps on there that help me out on a dail basis. I definitely want some of my linux floppy images on there such as UDPcast, tom's rescue linux, memory scanners and more. My boss has a 1gig version, and is definitely interested in being able to have a copy of my cd on his usb drive (the cd is only around 400 megs, but can be trimmed down big time).

I really appreciate your responses so far, thanks

You will need a different brand key first

[richajoh]

I don't know what they did to screw it up, but the Sandisk Cruzer Mini 256mb USB 2.0 key cannot be made bootable.

We went round and round with this key at work, finally wrote to their tech support and got that answer.

Every other brand key we have boots just fine.

Re:You will need a different brand key first

[xplosiv]

See my previous post how sandisk told me the same thing, yet I figured it out. I wrote them back explaining to them how to make it bootable for future reference, it works fine.

Re:Some comments about the replies (I'm the author

[danielsfca2]

That's awesome.

Just want you to know that many people would be willing to pay money for a copy or disk image of that CD. And by "many people" I mean me. =)

Interested? I'm sure we could work something out. I have PayPal.

M-SYS have a bootable USB drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look at m-systems their Disk On Key seems to support USB booting according to their literature.

RUNT USB

[tyndyll]

Not entirely what the poster was after, but interesting nonetheless RUNT is a pretty handy tool that can be made to boot from USB... If I remember correctly there was also possibly to configure ZipSlack to do this

Ask Ask Slashdot

[stuffduff]

On Ask Slashdot last week was an article about rolling your own operating system.

My guess is that you have a little bootloader which relies to some degree on the BIOS that would let you paint a menu and allow selection of the operating system.