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?

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

[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

[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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.