On 27/02/2012 01:35 PM, Invisible wrote:

> I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work? I
> rather suspect not. I've never actually seen any PC boot from a flash
> drive, ever - although I keep hearing that it's supposed to work...

OK, well... It turns out that writing my CD image to a flash drive 
doesn't work at all. But if I write a Linux live CD image to it instead, 
then it boots just fine. (At least, with the one PC that I tested with.)

Weird thing #1: For this to work, you have to write the image over the 
top of the entire drive, not just one partition of it. Which is strange, 
because I'm pretty sure that an ISO-9660 file system doesn't contain a 
valid IBM BIOS partition table at the start.

Weird thing #2: Once you've done this, it boots just fine, but Windows 
becomes awfully confused. It seems to see that only part of the drive is 
partitioned, but it utterly refuses to allow you to repartition it. So 
it is now impossible to use the whole capacity of the drive...

...from Windows. A quick trip to Linux land and it's a trivial operation 
to edit the partition table and get your drive back. :-P

I did try booting Linux from the flash drive. It did seem a bit quicker, 
but not that much. (Then again, I was testing with OpenSUSE, arguably 
the slowest distro ever made.) I might actually make a habit of booting 
Linux install disks in this way in future. As for my original CD... well 
it's a damned site quicker than a floppy disk! :-P That's good enough 
for me.

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