Booting Os On Harddrive Using Flash Drive Boot

[TAPE]

Title perhaps a little strange, but I recall a post here on the forums ages ago (cant find it :( ) where

the hiding of a dual installed OS was done by being able to boot it up using a flashdrive.

So when starting the laptop you would simply boot straight into windows, but if a flashdrive

was present you would be able to boot into the other OS installed..

Could someone perhaps give me some guidance on how best to accomplish this ?

Not sure whether I am explaining it properly, but perhaps someone out there able understand me ;)

Thanks !

[digip]

You can move boot loaders to flash drives, or even the windows SAM file to a flash drive. Shannon did an episode on how to do this, but if its strictly booting off removable media, that in itself can be done as well, like live cd's or flash drives. unetbootin can make bootable media if all you want is to boot something from cd, dvd, or thumb drives, but if its to protect the OS and "pre-boot" thats a bit of a different setup. Also, unless the file system is encrypted, moving the booter to removable media is simple that, but someone pulling the HDD and put in another machine, can still read off all your data or just boot off a live disc to copy off all your files. To protect that, you need to install to an encrypted file system. I think int0x80 also did a post or episode on how to do that as well. Was last season I think.

[TAPE]

Thks digip,

Basically I have backtrack in dual boot with my xp on a netbook, and was wondering how

to set it up so that when booting it goes straight into xp without the boot options screen

from showing.

Then get the boot option for backtrack when a usb drive is plugged in.

I was being lazy and havent done any checks/tests on how to do it yet myself, will dig deeper ;)

[Infiltrator]

Thks digip,

Basically I have backtrack in dual boot with my xp on a netbook, and was wondering how

to set it up so that when booting it goes straight into xp without the boot options screen

from showing.

Then get the boot option for backtrack when a usb drive is plugged in.

I was being lazy and havent done any checks/tests on how to do it yet myself, will dig deeper ;)

You need to go into the boot option, in the System configuration (msconfig), select the OS you want and change the default timeout to 0. But ideally, that's how dual boot works, you select which OS you want to boot first. If you don't want the OS options to appear, get rid of dual booting.

And the next time you want to boot another OS, off a usb or cd-rom just press the F8 key on your keyboard and select USB/CD-ROM from the boot menu. That's how I would've done anyway.

Edited October 8, 2012 by Infiltrator