Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Howto: Run Linux on a USB Drive

AltHack.com: How to Run Linux on a USB Drive

I've been meaning to attempt to create a bootable thumb drive with Linux on it. The above link provides, what seem to me, to be fool proof instructions on how to do this.

The only catch is that some thumb drives, and computers simply won't work for this purpose.

Still, with instructions this easy, it's worth a shot.

--Ben

Update: It works! It turns out, the instructions provided were as easy to follow as I had hoped. Everything went according to plan, and the longest part of the process turned out to be waiting for the 50MB distribution to download.

Getting Shira's laptop to boot off the USB drive took a bit of poking around the BIOS. It turns out, the laptop sees the USB device as another hard drive, and allows you to set it ahead of the primary drive in the boot order. Again, painless once I knew what I was doing.

It's pretty remarkable to think that I'm editing this blog post, using Firefox, running under Linux that booted off of a USB thumb drive. (That may be the geekiest sentence I have ever written.)

1 comment:

  1. You used MY laptop to test your little experiment??? I guess I'm glad to be reading it after the fact now that I know it had a happy ending.

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