Thumb drive for OS?

[PtBetsie]

I noticed on one of the last Dells that I worked with, there was an option to boot from USB. Is it possible to copy an OS to a thumb drive (formatted to NTFS) and have it boot a laptop?

[Sylvander]

With Puppy linux, it's not only possible, but easy to do.
You make a Puppy Linux live optical disk, boot it, then install it to the Flash drive.
There are ways other than using an optical disk and installing; it's possible to download a Puppy ISO file and copy to the Flash Drive certain files from within the ISO.
And if the particular BIOS on the hardware doesn't boot USB, Puppy can be used to easily make a "WakePup2" bootable floppy that [when booted] will look for a USB drive that has a Puppy installed, then load/boot that Puppy.
I use this setup for one of the three Puppies I use.

If using a "WakePup2" floppy, the partition file system on the Flash Drive must be accessible by DOS [on the floppy].
That is, it must be a FAT partition, NOT NTFS.

[PtBetsie]

I don't think any of our students/clients are up to Linux. Thanks for the suggestion though.

[Sylvander]

1. "I don't think any of our students/clients are up to Linux"
What makes you think so; have you tried it?
Puppy is different to the typical Linux.
Small, simple, uncomplicated.
As with Windows, you click on icons to get things done, except it's less complex than Windows.
e.g. The typical Puppy is single user, and that user is "Root" [Administrator capability], hence anything the user wants to do can be done; no problems with "permissions".

[Paul Komski]

Is it possible to copy an OS to a thumb drive (formatted to NTFS) and have it boot a laptop?

It remains a very inexact science - especially with Windows (which version?). Some claim to have succeeded with both WinXP SP2 on FAT16 (and a bit of tinkering) and some using Vista.

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-5928902.html

http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

Linux is generally more versatile in this area.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

[PtBetsie]

I haven't tried it and someday (time permitting) I probably will. With students I currently have using the center, none of them can use anything that is challenging. I was just being curious, a fault of mine, when I saw USB as a choice. Could that have been intended for an external HD?

[mjc]

The problem is with how Windows loads...the way things (drivers) load and the way it handles hardware detection tend to cause a complete reset of the USB bus and then it 'gets lost' and doesn't know where it it is in the boot process any longer. It doesn't mater if the device holding the OS is a stick, drive or CD...once Windows loses its place, the boot fails.

There are tricks to getting a bootable USB Windows install, but they are fairly complex.

And a modern Linux is graphical, point and click...with Firefox websurfing can be just the same as in Windows. With OpenOffice...you get the idea.

[Paul Komski]

It doesn't mater if the device holding the OS is a stick, drive or CD...once Windows loses its place, the boot fails.

I do agree in principle but just to be clear that this is generally when booting to a normal installation of WINDOWS somehow installed or copied onto any medium other than an internal (or eSATA) hard drive. There is generally no problem (supposing {a} that the BIOS ostensibly supports it in the first place and {b} that the OS in question is capable of recognising all the relevant hardware) when booting to a USB Live CD (including Windows-based ones like a Bart CD or UBCD4WIN), a USB Floppy and even a USB Zip Drive. It is booting to USB "hard drives" (including both spinning and solid state ones and USB "sticks" etc) that is the most problematic area since even when the BIOS makes it appear to be a possibility it very often is not - even with a bit of tweaking.

There can be other (usually driver related problems) when booting to any OS, from DOS onwards, on any particular piece of media connected via USB and this would typically include the distinctly different but related problem of running a normal installation setup of Windows from a bootable CD and onto a hard drive.

The firmware on Solid State USB drives generally inform the BIOS that the drives are, if you like, not normal hard drives in the first place and in addition they usually do not have a normal MBR with partition tables from which the boot process can choose a bootable partition. Even when these two areas have been overcome - by tweaking as necessary - the interplay between booting into the "OS" and the "OS" reading the hardware (including its own medium) can still make such start-ups impossible.

Such "tweaking" is generally done to both (a) cloak the device and inform the BIOS that the medium is actually other than what it normally would be and/or (b) to modify the existing boot sectors so that they fit in with what the BIOS currently expects to find.

Just one example. One has a nice working installation of WinXP on a small normal hard drive partition. This can be first imaged or directly copied (sector by sector) onto a partition on a USB "hard" drive; a partition that has been correctly marked as active and the boot processes then configured to choose the correct boot device and using all the same hardware. The PC is started. Windows starts to load but one never gets to the Welcome screen. The same procedure to any internal or eSATA drive or array will generally speaking be completely unproblematic as long as any RAID/SCSI/ACHI-SATA drivers had been made available in the first place.