Booting from USB

[Mr_Mischif]

I've got a mobo that can boot from USB, now I need to know what medium it needs. Can I have a ISO in the root folder and it'll boot fine or what?

[Uncle Toxie]

I want to say that just having an iso on the drive is not going to work. What you need is to have the OS "installed" on the flash drive, like you would on any hard drive. The only difference being is that the flash drive is removable.

If I am wrong about the iso bit, someone feel free to jump in here and call me on it. Would be interesting if you could do that though.........

[cooper]

Think of your USB drive as a floppy or a CD.

You don't put an ISO on any of those as a regular file to get the thing to boot off of it. No, you dump the ISO onto the medium, starting at the first sector and move on down the device, completely oblivious to things like filesystems. Once done you take it out/off, place it back in/on and hey! Lookit that. A filesystem is there complete with content.

[Mr_Mischif]

Think of your USB drive as a floppy or a CD.

You don't put an ISO on any of those as a regular file to get the thing to boot off of it. No, you dump the ISO onto the medium, starting at the first sector and move on down the device, completely oblivious to things like filesystems. Once done you take it out/off, place it back in/on and hey! Lookit that. A filesystem is there complete with content.

So would this mean that the USB drive would have to be devoted fully to the ISO, or could I partition it? I use it for things like school work also, so I need like 30-50MB left for myself.

[cooper]

Yeah, you can partition it. It's after all a harddisk or sorts.

Not sure if an ISO also contains the partition table of the drive though. Probably does. More interestingly, once that data is on there, ISO or not, it's still basically a writeable medium. As long as the filesystem allows it you can add files (iso suggest ISO/UDF filesystem, which don't typically allow this).

[remkow]

If you just want to install an OS on your USB stick, google around. There are a lot of tutorials explaining how to do it, both for windows and linux

one for windows on usb here: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/win...in_your_pocket/

[Mr_Mischif]

Well do you know any ISO burning programs that will allow me to burn to my drive? I've always used Iso Recorder for my ISO burns, but it only writes to CDs[/url]

[cooper]

Try this one:

DD for Windows

[Mr_Mischif]

Try this one:

DD for Windows

That may very well work, too bad I have no idea how to make it work. I'm trying to make it work on a 1GB cruzer

[Spartain X]

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/se...load/23839.html

that link is to a hp utility which will help you make your usb drive bootable

[Mr_Mischif]

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/se...load/23839.html

that link is to a hp utility which will help you make your usb drive bootable

Yeah, but it's for HP USB drives.

[Spartain X]

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/se...load/23839.html

that link is to a hp utility which will help you make your usb drive bootable

Yeah, but it's for HP USB drives.

but a lot of people have tested on no-hp usb drive including some no name usb drive, this is has been used in some tutorial on the net that i have seen todo this

[Mr_Mischif]

OK, now I've dl'd the file and installed it on my flash drive, but now it throws a kernel panic, and I can't load my preferred ISO.

It throws

VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(104,2)

Please append a correct "root=" boot option

Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(104,2)

And I have phlak at /components/phlak-0.3.iso but I can't seem to boot to it.

[cooper]

Sounds like the kernel you're trying to boot doesn't have USB support.

[Mr_Mischif]

Sounds like the kernel you're trying to boot doesn't have USB support.

:cry: But I used the file he gave me!

[cooper]

Your point being?

The kernel doesn't know what a USB device is it seems. Maybe it was designed to be started from a CDROM.

[Mr_Mischif]

OK, time to bump this up. I've dl'd Syslinux and I'm stuck. I have NO idea what to do, and the readmes don't help. I'd like it to be working beore I go back to school monday. Help please?