“Booting a computer from your USB flash drive may seem like a daunting task, but it is actually quite easy. With the right equipment and some basic knowledge this very useful technique can be taken advantage of in all sorts of different circumstances. This article goes over booting your Windows or Linux system from USB as well as booting directly into Linux and a few other details of the process.”
HP provides a free tool which handles this for Windows users.
http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/hpcpqdt/us/download/20306.h…
The instructions for the hardware were pretty straightforward. The suggestions for special distros should be useful.
However, if someone knows, please please tell me:
How can I boot to a USB drive FROM a local bootloader?
For example, 1) let my computer boot as normal to LILO (or GRUB, or NT loader), 2) If I want to load the local Windows installation I press 1, but if I want to load the USB linux drive, I press 2.
How can I do that??
This situation would not be handled by the BIOS, of course, it must be handled by the bootloader.
I have looked into some commercial and propietary apps like System Commander, PQ’s bootloader, zBootManager, and bootman.
It seems LILO would be the best candidate, since GRUB works only in Linux AFAIK, and requires its config file always to be visible, which can’t be guaranteed with the removable drive.
Please provide pointers. Neither Google or Altavista have done.
Hi,
you should create a little partition for boot files on your hard disk (could be 128 megs or so). There you store your grub config and kernel image. Then you set up your boot entry to boot the kernel image from the hard drive but with the partition on the usb drive as root= parameter. So effectively, you boot up from the usb storage.
For this to work you only need to have a kernel with the apropriete stuff compiled in for usb and usb mass storage, or a inird kernel.
Perhaps this could also work with files on a fat partition, I don’t know if it’s possible to read fat for grub, but I guess so. Also you should check out grub 2, which has more features than grub and perhaps supports usb, too.
Ford Prefect
Thank you for the pointers. I did not know there was a GRUB 2 in the works. I went out searching about it, and found this how-to while doing that [ http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fireboot.html ].
The most important line for me in the tutorial is the following:
I was also able to install a boot loader in the MBR of the internal drive and use that to boot the USB drive (where it appeared as hd1 in GRUB).
I usually prefer LILO, because (aside of pretty splash screens ) unlike GRUB, it can still boot into the other OSes if the partition with the config file is borked (or removed). GRUB can’t, AFAIK.
I know most people nowadays are biased towards GRUB, and will point that with LILO, what could get borked is the MBR.
In my case, LILO has been a more practical choice than GRUB, because 1) I don’t mess with bootloader configuration once it’s setup, 2) I can easily recover my MBR from a backup, and 3) I don’t need to worry about sticking to a partition just to accomodate for the config file. You see, sometimes I’ve had to wipe the whole partition and just reformat. GRUB doesn’t survive that. LILO does.
I will keep reading about GRUB 2. It seems that right now the documentation pages are not completely up yet.
At least I have been assured it can be done.
Thanks.
You’re right in that LILO has it’s config hardcoded in the MBR, while GRUB reads an external file. But it doesn’t really rely on that one. You can alter/create boot entrys in boot-time with grub. This is the main advantage of grub.
If ever some naming scheme in the system is changed, or you perhaps need to have your hard drive on another controller and so on, you don’t need to reinstall grub or boot from CD. You can alter the config while booting and then permanently update the config file.
In your case, this would mean you need to have a little manual or handwritten “backup” of the commands needed to load other OSes handy, if the partition is lost. That’s nasty. On the other side, it’s cool you can just on the fly boot something other / in a different way, esp. if you’re system won’t boot default any more.
It’s also nice you can update kernels etc. without having to rerun lilo.
(patched) GRUB supports splash screens, too. But I use Lilo myself, as I’m too lazy to update.
I needed to flash a new BIOS on my PVR, which runs Linux and has no floppy drive. The flash utility comes in DOS and Windows flavor. It may be possible to make a CD with Windows and the flash utility, but it seemed likely to involve quite a few steps. I’ve always used DOS floppies in the past.
The HP utility didn’t work for me, not liking the Compact Flash card borrowed from my camera. Or perhaps it was the drivers for the card reader it didn’t like.
Booting my desktop back into its usual Linux, I copied a bootable DOS floppy and added the flash utility and BIOS image to it. I then copied the new floppy as an image to the Compact Flash card using dd. Sure, the card ended up formatted for only 1.44MB, but that’s all that I needed.
My PVR booted from the card and USB reader, and the BIOS was updated. The only catch, which appears to common, is that I needed to set it to boot from the USB-ZIP drive, as the USB-FDD setting didn’t work. I read several tales of USB-FDD not working, even with USB floppies, much less flash devices.
Sometimes quick and dirty is good enough. And yes, my camera reformatted the card just fine afterwards.
I’d like to have a bootable usbstick from which I can scan my NTFS partitions for virusses. However, ‘linux on usb distro’s’ are not capable of removing those virusses (no or crappy NTFS write support) and ‘Bart PE’ (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) is very good but is only for cd’s or dvd’s.
Just a small desktop with a few utilities (virusscanner) which works good in combination with NTFS partitions, that’s all I’m asking for..
Yes, for years now it would have been (still would be) nice is MS provided an omnipotent windows installer combined with application management which would be able to install a bare base system on which you would be able to install further components, like dozens of linux distros can for countless years now. But you can’t do that.
And you can’t blame the linux kernel or any linux distro for – as you put it – “crappy” ntfs write support. Or if you do, please don’t forget to blame MS for their crappy support for industry standard journaling file systems.
Never tried it, but Captive NTFS is supposed to use the windows NTFS drivers. It may be worth a shot.
For those looking for a more permanent flash boot solution there are flash converters that plug directly into the IDE slot on a given mother board. Google Embedded IDE Compact Flash adapter. They support Micro Drives as well as Flash based CF.