Replacing Rescue CDs with USB Keys? 74
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?
Have you tried (Score:2, Interesting)
Ghosting to USB Key (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Have you tried (Score:1)
Worth a Shot (Score:1, Funny)
You lose compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
"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 (Score:2, Interesting)
Upgrading your BIOS? I know that's even becoming an obsolete reason with online updates to the flash bios from motherboard makers like MSI. Run a Windows app, flash the bios, reboot and voila. I suppose you could also create a bootable CD with the image on it. Programming classes at schools also like getting floppy di
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
One of my profs required us to hand in a floppy disk with the assignment on it along with the paper copy. Never gave us a reason, though I suspect it had something to do with the Turnitin service. As to why they didn't want electronic submissions, who knows? Profs are wacky people.
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
For a good example. Try Donald Knuth.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
Yep - I've done it, and it worked great! I made an El-Torito image of a DOS bootable floppy, and put the flash program and image on the CD. It sure beats the "Rrrr...Rrrr...Rrrr" sound of a bad sector on a floppy.
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
On desktops, I don't believe the OEMs are generally shipping floppyless computers (I haven't been looking, but I haven't heard anything about it) other than Apple. Apple (a) likes to make press waves about being forward-looking and (b) doesn't have some PC hardware architecture cruft where booting from floppies is still a significant benefit.
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:1)
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:1)
Saves Dell a few dollars on something few think that they want, and gives them an excuse to charge much more than the going rate for it as an "extra"; this must be how Dell makes a lot of their money- take basic stuff, repackage as "upgrades" at inflated prices.
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:1)
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)
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 o
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:2)
Re:You lose compatibility (Score:1)
I tried this... (Score:5, Informative)
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. [nwst.de]
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.
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:2, Funny)
I can see why you're unemployed. Repeat after me, Microsoft is not a BIOS manufacturer...
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:1)
I hope with your holy-er than thou attitude you are also unemployed, but because in your hurry to flame me you completely ignored one issue of booting.
If Microsoft's USB drivers don't support booting from USB it doesn't matter what your BIOS supports. I'm not sure how windows boots, but I know that OS/2 which is similar in some ways has a separate boot driver that loads the OS and then the main driver has code to take over, if those pieces are not written there is no chance of booting from USB. (You cou
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:2)
When the BIOS supports USB Mass Storage Booting, it is seen as a legacy device (hard drive), much like the El Torito standard allows emulation of a floppy drive on the cd.
DOS predates USB, but DOS can be booted off of a USB Key.
This is why I had no problems flaming you, you didn't know what was involved yet was volunteering to do it.
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:1)
My comment still stands, because when windows takes over it will installs its own USB drivers. unless you are going to try to convince me that in this day and age windows XP uses BIOS to address diskdrives? I don't think so, windows 95 maybe, but XP has moved byond such backward ways of working. So if the drivers are not coded right, it gets to the point in the boot process where it starts loading USB drivers, and things fail because the disk has not been reset, or there are two filesystems trying to wo
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:2)
1) I apologize for the being unemployed crap. I was there too, for a very long time. Sorry.
2) We weren't talking about Windows booting off of a USB, we were originally talking about Linux. I have had no issues booting either off of my USB hard drive.
Linux treats the USB drive as a scsi drive. This mean's that you use the initrd to boot and it will then remount after the kernel takes over from the bios. No additional work should be nessecary.
Microsoft also is installed
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:2)
As I don't have a system that can boot from USB I have to work with what I know. I know that if linux doesn't work I can make it work.
Linux does not treat USB as a SCSI disk, usb is a SCSI disk. The USB (and 1394) people made the decision to not create a new protocol, instead they reused the scsi command set. So a USB disk is SCSI. (In a previous job I was working with USB cddrom drives, so I know how USB works in general)
Your right though, if it already works I guess I'll have to find a different
Re:I'll Make it work (Score:2)
Mine is a 40 GB Laptop IDE disk in a USB Enclosure. I realize the enclosure communicates with my system using the SCSI protocol. Although for all practical purposes you are right....
The best advantage of CD... (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Shuttle Cube systems (Score:2)
I may be worth getting in touch with them to explore this.
Re:Shuttle Cube systems (Score:2)
You coul of course, (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:treat it as if it were a CD (Score:2)
I don't really understand what the purpose of this is. If he's already got this all setup with CDs, why bother with much more expensive USB key disks that hold less stuff? The closest key drive to a CD would be a 512MB one and last time I checked they were over $100. Just burn
Re:treat it as if it were a CD (Score:2)
Re:treat it as if it were a CD (Score:1)
8cm mini-CDs [dabs.com].
Fit almost any CD drive since the late 80s (yeah, the format *has* been around that long).
Hold 210MB.
Plus.... interesting talking point as they look "cute".
Re:Firewire drives (Score:1)
floppy still has a use (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:floppy still has a use (Score:1)
Whereupon it prompts you for the FLOPPY (yes, I'm yelling) containing said drivers.
booting linux from pendrive (Score:4, Informative)
---
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Re:booting linux from pendrive (Score:2)
Yep. I went to www.bootdisk.com [bootdisk.com] and grabbed a bootable floppy image, copied the necessary files to update the BIOS into it and then wrote it as the boot image of a bootable CD.
Screw that! (Score:2)
All these people saying the floppy is dead because you can boot from your USB thumb drive are blowing smoke out their ass. I seriously don't think it can be done.
My notes on a bootable USB drive (Score:5, Informative)
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
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 (Score:5, Informative)
and so on. I'm not booting a full rescue image from the key, mostly just disk images.
Re:I did it using grub (Score:2)
Re:I did it using grub (Score:1)
-A
Smart BootManager (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
USB Rom? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:USB Rom? (Score:2)
Some comments about the replies (I'm the author) (Score:1)
Here [marstracker.com]. is a screenshot of the current CD (since this ask slashdot didn't get posted on the front page unfortunately, I can post the screenshot now). I did notice some replies have some really good instructions, I will be
Re:Some comments about the replies (I'm the author (Score:2)
Just want you to know that many people would be willing to pay money for a copy or disk image of that CD. And by "many people" I mean me. =)
Interested? I'm sure we could work something out. I have PayPal.
You will need a different brand key first (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:You will need a different brand key first (Score:1)
RUNT USB (Score:1)
Ask Ask Slashdot (Score:1)
My guess is that you have a little bootloader which relies to some degree on the BIOS that would let you paint a menu and allow selection of the operating system.