On 27/02/2012 16:53, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:35:22 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>
>> I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work?
>
> Yep.  Use isohybrid to get it working.
>
> I do this quite regularly with openSUSE ISO images in order to boot from
> a USB flash drive instead.  Installs are *much* quicker.

The seek time on a CD drive /is/ rather poor. I find that when I install 
stuff onto a VM, using an ISO image on a networked file server, it runs 
/way/ faster than if I really did put the physical CD into the local 
machine's drive and run it without any VM overhead.

So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the 
ISO image to the flash drive? Or do I have to /do/ stuff to it first to 
make it work?

Also, is there a quick way to test whether a particular PC even 
/supports/ booting from flash? Like I say, I've never seen it actually 
work IRL. Is there some easily available image I can test with?

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On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:15:13 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the
> ISO image to the flash drive? Or do I have to /do/ stuff to it first to
> make it work?

You have to use isohybrid to make it work.  Try a google search as that 
should tell you what it does and how to use it.

Jim

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On 2/27/2012 6:35 AM, 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...
Had to do precisely that to install a new copy of the Linux for the EePC 
I installed a new, bigger, SSD drive into it. So, yeah, you can, but not 
all of them can be formatted to be booted, and the BIOS needs to support 
the ability to boot from USB devices.

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On 2/27/2012 3:01 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:15:13 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the
>> ISO image to the flash drive? Or do I have to /do/ stuff to it first to
>> make it work?
>
> You have to use isohybrid to make it work.  Try a google search as that
> should tell you what it does and how to use it.
>
> Jim
Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages 
of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.

Looking over one of those pages, you are actually doing:

1. Format
2. Partition
3. Copy over the needed files (or install to it, I supposed).
4. Make it bootable (presumably the same way you do an HDD, but marking 
the partition as "live".

This makes it looks like a normal HDD to the system, as long as the 
system recognizes USB as a boot option.

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On 28/02/2012 10:02 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages
> of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.

Someone probably has a ready-made script to boot Linux from a flash 
drive, probably using Grub. But I'm trying to boot MS-DOS. I imagine 
that's going to be harder. (USB didn't /exist/ when MS-DOS was written, 
after all...)

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On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:01:02 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> On 28/02/2012 10:02 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> 
>> Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages
>> of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.
> 
> Someone probably has a ready-made script to boot Linux from a flash
> drive, probably using Grub. But I'm trying to boot MS-DOS. I imagine
> that's going to be harder. (USB didn't /exist/ when MS-DOS was written,
> after all...)

Did you read the *isohybrid* info like I've suggested *twice* now?

Jim

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On 2/28/2012 6:01 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 28/02/2012 10:02 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages
>> of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.
>
> Someone probably has a ready-made script to boot Linux from a flash
> drive, probably using Grub. But I'm trying to boot MS-DOS. I imagine
> that's going to be harder. (USB didn't /exist/ when MS-DOS was written,
> after all...)
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

Gives a number of examples, some of which are "basically" what I said 
before. But, no, its exactly the same process. As long as the stick has 
been formatted, and set up, to be bootable, it doesn't care, any more 
than the system does, that its a flash drive, instead of an HDD.

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On 2/27/2012 12:15, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the ISO

Do *not* do a block-level copy to a USB stick if you ever want that stick to 
ever work again.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:02:19 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> On 2/27/2012 12:15, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the
>> ISO
> 
> Do *not* do a block-level copy to a USB stick if you ever want that
> stick to ever work again.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by this, no, this isn't correct 
- you can do:

dd if=/path/to/iso/dvd.iso of=/dev/sdg

And create a bootable USB flash drive if the iso is prepped with 
isohybrid.

And when done, you can reformat the device very easily:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg
fdisk /dev/sdg

Piece of cake.

Jim

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On 28/02/2012 05:14 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

> Did you read the *isohybrid* info like I've suggested *twice* now?

Yeah, I did.

As best as I can tell, there's a thing called isolinux which lets you 
boot Linux from a CD-ROM. And then isohybrid allows you to modify such 
an image so it can be booted from any block device [that the BIOS 
supports]. I'm not immediately seeing how this relates to booting 
another OS.

I did, however, see several references which seem to suggest that just 
grabbing a random Linux live CD and dumping it onto a flash drive will 
probably work, so I might just try that to see if my BIOS even 
/supports/ such a thing...

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