h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Tal,

Just got meself a new usb flash drive as needed one for my OU residential week. Grabbed one from the supermarket and they had an offer on a sandisk 8Gb with US launchpad compatibility.

I'm not too up on pendrives and Linux nor the various standards so thought I'd ask as you mentioned it.

Have you used a Linux boot USB Drive? If so which distro did you got for? And do you know if you can part format the drive so I can keep the windows bits for work programs and boot linux from it?

"US launchpad compatibility"

Watch out NASA I have compatibility!

I meant U3 of course.

Have any sanctions been imposed yet?

~~~

Interesting..

You can partition the flash drive, just like any other drive, but as for the dual boot.. hmmmm

I installed a full distro, I think it was Kanotix, on a 512Mb flash drive, just to see if it could be done. It wasn't very useful, since the installation consumed almost all space. More recently I installed a stripped-down OS X Leopard on an 8Gb, so I could run some maintenance applications on unmounted OS X system drives.

I've never tried to install a working XP on one, let alone a dual-boot xp/linux. It so happens I have a 16Gb USB flash drive, and I'm willing to experiment

One problem with running an OS from a flash drive is the paging/swap file. The constant writes tend to burn out the chip. I think this can be at least partially ameliorated by designating a swap space on the host system's hard disk.

I'll do some detective work, and report back here

Oo. Looky what I found. All hail teh google!

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/dual-boot-slax-linux-bartpe-windows-usb

I'm gonna give it a go. Slax is pretty good, and probably ideal for this purpose, because it's so tiny

Off to the lab...

good link that, shall have to have a play and compare results!

currently slipstreaming xp pro with service pack 3, using Autostreamer -- http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/Autostreamer.shtml

Moreso, I'm working in a virtual XP environment under Debian...

Oh, the geekiness of it all!

"Oh, the geekiness of it all!"
Heh, you love it really

Just careful you don't break your geek-o-meter!

No luck yet on booting xp.

I must admit I got sidetracked into trying to make a 'persistent' usb system -- which would be capable of storing new data between boots.

Now the project is on hold for a couple of days while I attend to other matters

Still too busy.