Use your USB stick to replace booting from a CD/DVD

[wdhpr]

I recently come across this browsing my favorite software sites. The application is called WintoFlash.
http://wintoflash.com/home/en/

There may come a day that optical drives are as hard to find as 5.25 floppy drives are today.

WinToFlash starts a wizard that will help pull over the contents of a windows installation CD or DVD and prep the USB drive to become a bootable replacement for the optical drive. It can also do this with your LiveCD.

You don't have to worry about scratches on the disc or misplacing your original media discs once you transfer their contents to the flash drive. The optical drive is quickly becoming a thing of the past, especially in office environments, as media is shifted to the cloud.

With the cost of usb sticks being sold at a reasonable price this may become a good alternative. I currently use a USB stick to boot to linux as a recovery tool. As an example this utility appears to allow you keep you windows installation disk loaded on your USB stick. Looks like its worth checking out.

Cheers
Wdhpr

[Anupam]

Might be a useful software. Its still in beta though. Thanks for sharing.

[Jojoyee]

Some BIOS in older PCs are not supporting booting from USB sticks, though now most newer PCs do. That said, I have a Live USB stick to boot into Ubuntu, I tested it on a notebook and it booted up successfully,but when I tested the same on an older PC running on XP, it failed to boot up even booting up from "Removable device" is chosen. (No "USB device" option).

Any idea?

[Sope]

Also useful for people with netbooks that don't have a DVD drive built in.

[1002richards]

You can run many versions of Linux from USB stick:

I've used guides at pendrivelinux several times with good results:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

[dre]

Originally Posted by Jojoyee

Some BIOS in older PCs are not supporting booting from USB sticks, though now most newer PCs do. That said, I have a Live USB stick to boot into Ubuntu, I tested it on a notebook and it booted up successfully,but when I tested the same on an older PC running on XP, it failed to boot up even booting up from "Removable device" is chosen. (No "USB device" option).

Any idea?

Reason is, it cant read USB (boot) you need to be able to format it in such a way that it would see it as a floppy,zip etc. All the older hardware. Then it would work.

Reason i know this is, because i recently downloaded Linux puppy. It is a full blown O.S that runs totally in RAM...

Anyway so i started to set it up on my flash, chose the option to format it like a USB HDD. The older PC still did not see the flash that i made bootable. I also tried it on a laptop.

Then there was the option to format it as a combo. (ZIP,HDD,Floppy etc)


I rebooted and my flash booted perfectly with puppy installed on it.

So my suggestion is download Puppy, boot live and choose the combo format option and select you O.S image. Then you USB Flash should boot from older machines...

[Jojoyee]

Originally Posted by dre

Then there was the option to format it as a combo. (ZIP,HDD,Floppy etc)

I rebooted and my flash booted perfectly with puppy installed on it.

So my suggestion is download Puppy, boot live and choose the combo format option and select you O.S image. Then you USB Flash should boot from older machines...

Interesting. Hmmm, only available to Puppy? This USB-Installer for Ubuntu works for my notebook but not for older PC to boot from USB. So is there one to format it as a combo for Ubuntu too?

[dre]

Originally Posted by Jojoyee

Interesting. Hmmm, only available to Puppy? This USB-Installer for Ubuntu works for my notebook but not for older PC to boot from USB. So is there one to format it as a combo for Ubuntu too?

I was searching for some utility now. No luck, Puppy looks like the only answer at the moment...

If someone finds such a App please let me know...

Puppy will do

[dre]

Okay found a other solution...

http://www.xxxxxxxxxxx/blog/archives/...ed-using-plop/

[Jojoyee]

Thanks a lot. Will try it out.