Anyone tried booting from a USB drive?

Hey, I was wondering if anyone had tried booting Linux from a USB drive. I want to give it a try, but can only find one tutorial and it is cryptic at best. Any one know of a good tutorial or has tried it and can give me some advice? I honestly do not know were to start, especially since Google has failed me(which is very rare)

 

Do a google search for Knoppix, Slax, the usb guides should pop up.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoppix
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.html

 

RefinedPower, have you tried installing a distro to USB and then selecting boot from USB in the BIOS? That should work without any problems. If on the other hand, your BIOS doesn't support this, then you'll have to do something called chainbooting. You might be interested in reading this article: http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/22/2221258&tid=2 which describes a very useful setup (USB installation + hardware redetection), so instead of dragging your laptop around from place to place, you can just take your USB drive with everything installed as is and you can then plug it into any machine and boot up the drive. Sweeet

PS. You might have to format your USB drive. I would recommend you backup everything on it first.

 

Hmm, thats interesting, I never thought of that. I'll have to give it a try.

 

It works, just make sure your flash drive has decent read/write speeds or it'll be painfully slow.

 

Yea I want to give it a try because I have been hearing that samsung wants to get flash drives into notebooks (they currently have a 64GB USB drive) I want to see if that was technologically practical. I guess I will have to get a fairly big and fast drive though.

 

Just out of curiosity, why not get a firewire drive instead? If you're getting a USB drive because it can be powered through the USB port, then I guess you'll have to stick to USB, but if that's not the restriction, I think you're better of using a firewire enclosure if your BIOS supports booting off of firewire.

 

Yea that would probably be best, but since my laptop(oddly enough) does not even have firewire, that is not an option for me. plus I want to see how an OS will boot off of solid state memory i.e. Flash.