[Ham-Computers] RE: Booting off of a flash drive

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

Yes, it can be done, but it requires that your PC support booting from a USB drive.  Most systems that boot from USB use hard drive emulation (so you need to partition the USB drive), but some require that the USB drive be accessed in "RAW" mode without a partition (basically a giant floppy).

The easiest way to create a bootable DOS flash drive is to use a utility such as one provided by HP.  Here's a link to the "newest" version of this utility - WARNING it's 45MB in size.  I haven't used this version, so I'm not sure what it's like.  I last used it when it was v1.1 many years ago.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&mode=3&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-UNITY-I23839


Here's a link to a "how to" page - it uses the older version (v2.18) of the HP utility:

http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm


I haven't used these utilities as I just do it on my own with an old fashioned bootable floppy disk.  Same process as formatting a hard drive, except you're partitioning and formatting a flash drive.  Here's a quick run-down:

1.  Insert flash drive.
2.  Start system and enter BIOS Setup.
3.  Enable "Legacy" USB device support (supplies power to USB ports).
4.  Change boot order to floppy first.
5.  Boot from DOS floppy disk.
6.  Run FDISK, change to USB drive, and create Primary paritition.
7.  Double-check to make sure Primary partition is set to "active".
8.  Exit FDISK and reboot
9.  Boot from floppy disk again.
10. Format the flash drive with "/S".
11. Reboot and see if the system boots from the flash drive.

Couple of things to keep in mind...

* You may want to disconnect or disable the hard drives while doing this - just to be sure you don't accidentally format the wrong drive.  Always verify that you're FDISK and FORMATing the correct drive!!!

* You may need to change the boot order so that the system boots from a USB device first.  Some systems allow you to press a <Fn> key during POST to select a specific drive/device to boot from and override the default boot order.  Use whichever method is more convenient to you.

* You can also use a drive imaging utility (such as GHOST) to clone flash drive from a working hard drive image (or a working bootable flash drive).  So long as the system recognizes the flash drive as a hard drive, just about everything that works with hard drives will also work with the flash drive.


As for other OS's, Linux is pretty simple and there are several distros that fit and boot from flash drives.  WinXP can be done, but it can be a royal PITA as Windows normally resets the USB bus during boot (thus disconnecting USB drives and killing it's own boot process).  Google will provide you with some links on how to get this done.

73,

  - Aaron, NN6O



-----Original Message-----
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 1:14 PM
Subject: [Ham-Computers] Booting off of a flash drive


I know this may have been discussed before but is there a way to install an operating system on a flash drive and boot from it?
 
Loren WA7SKT