Booting from USB key WITHOUT BIOS support.
Hey I was looking for a little guidance concerning a few nuances of booting via USB.
I have been looking for a use for my 512MB usb stick for a long time. I was very interested in installing a small version of linux on there, but I had very little success. This is completely due to the fact that all of the motherboards in my house and at my school do not support booting via USB. This does not suprise me. What DOES suprise me is the lack of Floppy and CDROM bootloaders that will let me boot into an installation of linux on a USB key.
Thankfully I found the only distro that allows me to do what I want - feather linux. The key thing is that feather linux has a seperate image file for a floppy bootdisk that in turn boots from the USB key. It makes things so much faster, and allows me to save files back to the key. Unfortunately, feather linux is a little TOO light. Runs well, but doesn't have the most brilliant hardware support or included software. I want to install something else to my USB key, but still retain the ability to boot from computers without the USB BIOS support.
I know this question is a little bit of a stretch. Ideally, I'd want to boot into a copy of BackTrack if I can cut enough off of the image. However, i'd be just as happy booting into Slax and then adding modules that I want. I have found nothing that will let me boot into a copy of slax on a USB key without bios support. Does anyone know if this is possible with slax, or how one would go about doing that? Is there a way to modify syslinux or the feather linux boot floppy to get it to load into slax instead of feather linux? Are there any related distros that can do what I want?
Thanks for taking the time to deal with my relatively inexperienced questions.
I have been looking for a use for my 512MB usb stick for a long time. I was very interested in installing a small version of linux on there, but I had very little success. This is completely due to the fact that all of the motherboards in my house and at my school do not support booting via USB. This does not suprise me. What DOES suprise me is the lack of Floppy and CDROM bootloaders that will let me boot into an installation of linux on a USB key.
Thankfully I found the only distro that allows me to do what I want - feather linux. The key thing is that feather linux has a seperate image file for a floppy bootdisk that in turn boots from the USB key. It makes things so much faster, and allows me to save files back to the key. Unfortunately, feather linux is a little TOO light. Runs well, but doesn't have the most brilliant hardware support or included software. I want to install something else to my USB key, but still retain the ability to boot from computers without the USB BIOS support.
I know this question is a little bit of a stretch. Ideally, I'd want to boot into a copy of BackTrack if I can cut enough off of the image. However, i'd be just as happy booting into Slax and then adding modules that I want. I have found nothing that will let me boot into a copy of slax on a USB key without bios support. Does anyone know if this is possible with slax, or how one would go about doing that? Is there a way to modify syslinux or the feather linux boot floppy to get it to load into slax instead of feather linux? Are there any related distros that can do what I want?
Thanks for taking the time to deal with my relatively inexperienced questions.
