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Data Storage Operating Systems Software

Replacing Rescue CDs with USB Keys? 74

Posted by Cliff from the switching-media dept.
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?
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Replacing Rescue CDs with USB Keys? More

Replacing Rescue CDs with USB Keys?

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  • Have you tried (Score:2, Interesting)

    by b00m3rang ( 682108 )
    Ghosting from your CD to the USB dongle?

    • Ghosting to USB Key (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Geccie ( 730389 )
      Do not ghost to a flash USB device. I think that the repetitive rewriting of the directory information will burn the directory portion of the disk. Make a ghost image, then copy it to the flash disk. Supposedly, ghost 8 supports usb devices. Also, a co-worker of mine has had problems copying between usb hdds. He has to copy from usb hdd1 to local drive then to usb hdd2. - Geccie
    • Pah! a *real* programmer would hack together a hex input device and punch in the bootloader op-codes from memory ;)

  • Worth a Shot (Score:1, Funny)

    by luigi22_ ( 733738 )
    Just treat it like you would a CD. But don't put it in your burner, unless you like fried USB.

  • You lose compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:02PM (#8208974) Homepage Journal
    With the advent of bootable CDs, everyone cried "Throw away the floppy, you dont need it for anything!", that is until they came across their mothers busted 10 year old packard bell. Now you propose to do the same thing to cds with the promise of a usb key. Seeing that your computer not only needs to support USB AND be able to boot from USB. The range of computers you can do this is MUCH less then that which can boot from a cdrom which is MUCH LESS then the computers that can boot from floppies.

    • Re:You lose compatibility (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chasuk ( 62477 ) <chasuk@gmail.com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:32PM (#8209116)
      Except that an increasing number of PC's don't come with floppy drives, thank goodness. I haven't sold a laptop with a floppy drive in months, and when I ask cusomers whether they want a floppy drive installed in the new computer we are assembling, most say:

      "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.
      • I haven't sold a laptop with a floppy drive in months, and when I ask cusomers whether they want a floppy drive installed in the new computer we are assembling, most say: "Whatever for?"

        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

        • Where the heck did you go to school? You say professor, so I assume you're not talking about high school or anything... why would you ever hand in a physical floppy, cd, or whatever? Why not just use electronic submission?
          • "You say professor, so I assume you're not talking about high school or anything... why would you ever hand in a physical floppy, cd, or whatever?"

            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.

          • You are aware that some people don't like to be contacted electronically? :)

            For a good example. Try Donald Knuth.

            http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email. ht ml


        • 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.

        • I too had several programming classes like this, both paper and floppy (although a zip was acceptable). The idea was that the professor could quickly go through the stack of floppies while at their computer to verify that the program ran correctly, and then have their TA (or themselves) go over the code with a fine tooth comb (at times) anywhere else and verify it's correctness to the rules.
      • Okay, laptops are a special case. Size and space are a *premium*, and a 3.5" square is a pretty big deal.

        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.
        • I just ordered a Dell for my mother (and order a half dozen a couple of months ago for work) and in about 50% of the machines I looked at, a floppy drive was an optional extra.
          • I just ordered a Dell... in about 50% of the machines I looked at, a floppy drive was an optional extra.

            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.
      • Sorry, but if your idea of an uber-machine is to be sans floppy, then all you/they really want is a network
        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

        • Oddly enough, in my little area of the world, there's three x86 boxes, all of which will boot off a USB key (and make it writable from DOS). Now, if I had older x86 hardware that wouldn't boot from a USB key, I'd need floppies; as it is, I can get by fine with a bootable USB key.
      • 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.
        I'm guessing that the tri-delts were the ones that didn't know what the USB drives were?

  • I tried this... (Score:5, Informative)

    by doublebackslash ( 702979 ) <doublebackslash@gmail.com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:06PM (#8208997)
    Getting a kernel or anything to boot off of a usb key is a pain in places that I didn't even know i had places. The hardware has to have a system in place to map the usb dongle to a hard drive (like the hard drive image on a cdrom) or it's going to be a battle for you that i have yet to win, even loading the initrd.img (INItial Ram Disk compressed with gzip) from a floppy.
    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.

  • The best advantage of CD... (Score:4, Informative)

    by FreshMeat-BWG ( 541411 ) <bengoodwyn AT me DOT com> on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:17PM (#8209054) Homepage
    It is the same each time I boot. The initial ramdisk is loaded from the CD and I can do anything I want while booted from the CD (even 'rm -rf /') and I know that my system will boot to the CD next time just as well as last time.

    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)

    by lambent ( 234167 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:17PM (#8209055)
    The posts so far have been right on the money: boot from usb device, while several years old, is not as common as we would like it to be.

    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.

  • They claim to boot from USB (I was reading their manual and the BIOS is supossed to boot from USB disks, a flash memory key should appear as nothing but a disk).

    I may be worth getting in touch with them to explore this.

  • You coul of course, (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gleapsite ( 713682 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:25PM (#8209092) Homepage

    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)

    by morelife ( 213920 ) <f00fbug@post[ ]O ... t ['REM' in gap]> on Friday February 06, 2004 @10:27PM (#8209098)
    you'll have to burn an el torito bootable image and then dd it to the boot sector of the USB. You can make partitions in the key for each OS. Grub can be the boot loader, but you'll have to set up the OS images on a separate PC as if they were the principal image, then dd/copy them to the appropriate partition on the USB key.

    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.
    • 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.

      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

  • floppy still has a use (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Nerdy ( 314261 )
    My raid card comes with the drivers on a floppy. Until I figure out how to tell windows xp installation to load them from a cd or hard drive, I have to use the floppy when I reinstall.

  • booting linux from pendrive (Score:4, Informative)

    by Verence ( 145084 ) on Friday February 06, 2004 @11:12PM (#8209321)
    Gentoo forums thread [gentoo.org] titled "Booting Linux from a USB Pendrive"

    ---
    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)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:40AM (#8209755) Journal
      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?

      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...
    • 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?

      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! I haven't even gotten past the first step of getting the system to even recognize the USB device on bootup. The BIOS says bootable USB is enabled, but there's nowhere to specify it as the first boot device, and it's never accessed.

    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)

    by jshare ( 6557 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @12:48AM (#8209802) Homepage
    What follows are some quick notes on making the USB keychains bootable (the bios must support booting from USB).

    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 /dev/sda), but I've not tried it.

    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)

    by JeffL ( 5070 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @02:02AM (#8210064) Homepage
    I boot my usb key drive using grub. As long as the PC has BIOS support for booting a USB device, it should work:

    1. Make the usb key work under Linux, plug it in so it is /dev/sda1 (for example)
    2. copy the grub stuff out of /boot/grub to /boot/grub on the key
    3. run grup --no-floppy
    4. in grub type device (hd0) /dev/sda
    5. then root (hd0,0) grub should say it found a fat filesystem
    6. then install (hd0) and grub should do its thing
    7. now you can boot from your usb key with grub
    of course now you have to put things on the key to be booted. Using memdisk from syslinux is convenient to boot floppy images. My menu.lst looks something like:

    title Memtest86+
    kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memtestv100.bin

    title IBM/Hitachi Disk Fitness Test 3.50
    kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk
    initrd (hd0,0)/boot/dftv350.bin

    title Western Digital DLG Diag Ver. 11
    kernel --no-mem-option (hd0,0)/boot/memdisk
    initrd (hd0,0)/boot/wdlifeguard.img

    and so on. I'm not booting a full rescue image from the key, mostly just disk images.

  • Smart BootManager (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Saturday February 07, 2004 @06:23AM (#8210737) Homepage
    Smart BootManager [sourceforge.net] is a personal favourite bootloader for me. My favourite feature is probably useless for what you intend to do, but if you stick it on a floppy, it will let you boot from the CDROM of a computer ancient enough that it doesn't normally support CDROM booting. This has saved me from pulling out my hair numerous times to boot, say, a Windows install CD, or a Debian install CD, or whatever you may need to install that is too big to fit on a disk or USB drive.

    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.
  • What about developing a low-cost, one-time-programmable (OTP, probably a fuse-map via strobing rows & cols) USB, and maybe Firewire, ROM single-chip solution? Could this be made cheaper than a CD (and all the support equipement)? One single chip could replace the entire CD manufacturing process with a unversal, solid-state OTP media than could hold anything from an OS, apps, etc. Just think, a chip could be "burned" from a kiosk containing software/songs/etc., or replace CD-Rs.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Programs on encrypted USB rom carts? What about having all programs (but maybe not data) reside on a card (not copied to a computer)? If you want a program, you have to buy it and plug it in. And if you want to uninstall it, just remove it. =D It's sure is low-tech, but that wouldn't that stop most pirating? Product activation and typing in long serialz is a waste of time and effort.
  • Many people suggest to stick with my CD, which I will, the reason I want to use my usb keychain (which I got for Christmas) drive is because I have it always on me, it's so tiny, doesn't push my wallet to its physical limits, and most of the systems I have or work on support USB booting.

    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
  • I don't know what they did to screw it up, but the Sandisk Cruzer Mini 256mb USB 2.0 key cannot be made bootable.

    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.
  • Not entirely what the poster was after, but interesting nonetheless RUNT [ncsu.edu] is a pretty handy tool that can be made to boot from USB... If I remember correctly there was also possibly to configure ZipSlack [slackware.com] to do this
  • On Ask Slashdot last week was an article about rolling your own operating system [slashdot.org].

    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.

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