[Gllug] Re: Bootable pen drives again

[Mark Williams]

On Monday 12 Feb 2007 22:38, Christopher Currie wrote:
> On  Sun, 11 Feb 2007 14:42:01 +0100 (CET)
>
>  salsaman at xs4all.nl wrote:
> > You might want to check this out:
> >
> > http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mandriva-Flash-Available-41825.shtml
> >
> > "Mandriva Flash is a pre-installed Mandriva Linux distribution on a
> > simple 2GB USB flash drive."
> >
> > Gabriel.
>
> Many thanks. Spot on. It looks impressive, but at 79 Euros it should be.
> Though they charge 44 euros for the download version of Mandriva Discovery,
> so the stick is not all that more.
>
> But ' take it everywhere and make any desktop your own!' seems a bit much,
> given the problems with BIOS and USB booting that have been discussed here.
>

I have to say, I've had no great trouble booting things from USB unless I go 
to antique PC's. It's getting the stick to take an image that's been trouble.

DSL will split a stick to 2 drives - 1 small image + a data area - if you use 
the USB-ZIP option, which some BIOSes seem to need. Fdisk removes them & mkfs 
restores normality if wanted. The 'toram' option is so fast it would be 
really impressive, if it had any big apps to load quickly ;)

I haven't bought a Mandriva stick (though I generally use their distro) but 
imagine it's based on the bootable CD/DVD version, which is fairly 
comprehensive.

If you really want to make ANY desktop your own, I think you need 2 sticks, 
one as HDD emulation & one as ZIP - possibly a 3rd for CD but I haven't 
needed one yet. I'm going to take one (OK, 2..) to see if I can rescue a 
friends unbootable Win XP mess soon - these things so take the pain out of 
this exercise! (Well, some of it - it's still Windows).

Mark

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