boot to usb

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onaclov2000

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 3, 2001
Messages
79
Hey I have heard some hearsay and such about computers with certain bios can boot to usb, if that is so can one person put an operating system on a 1gb usb pendrive then boot to that drive and run your system in turn creating no moving parts,...

I am wanting to buy a mini atx board with boot to usb, because I want to maybe put it in my car thus bumps=noskip so I need to know what kinds have this capability if no mini then regular sized ones can anyone help me out with this
 
yes and no.

You can boot to USB, yes you can put a Lite version of an OS on there and have no need for much else, but your USB drive is only made to handle a million writes or so, and you could do that in a few days easily.

There is a topic in the Cool Cases, or the Folding Forum, something like " USB PenDrive Garden" or something like that. It exactly what you are talking about.

He has like 6 motherboards that he is running Folding on, and that is all he is running, so he boots the boards off a single pen drive, then they are self sastaining, until they need to be rebooted.
 
Being able to boot by USB is all controlled by the BIOS. Both my Asus motherboards (P4PE and P4S8X-X) support booting from USB as I boot my external Western Digital 120 GB USB2 hard drive for backup purposes and Ghost. But my brothers Toshiba Portege 3500 tablet pc has a crippled BIOS that only supports booting from 5 specific manufacturers drives. I know this, because we had to buy an expensive cdrom drive from Targus ($400 Cdn) to reinstall the OS (WinXP Tablet Edition), a $200 cdrom drive wouldn't boot, the BIOS refused to recognize it.
 
hey I have the asus motherboard
but I don't know exactly how to set the boot to usb
it says something about scsi and something to do with lan I think (not sure exactly off the top of my head)
maybe time for a upgrade in bios or something????? I don't know
also what are you running yours at
mine is supposed to be 2.6 but is only at 2.053 right now can't git it any faster!!!!!
 
what about the Linux OS that is run off a cd couln't you set it up to boot off of your usb (that specific linux) then it loads it to your ram, then if you choose to make a change in the os you could but only if you choose to


??????

tyson
 
if u try to install a os into a 1gb usb flash, it will be very slow. and u will be decreasing the life of ur flash drive, i dont think u can install an windows os there.
 
you can boot gnoppix off a cd-rom drive, and then save settings to flash memory. it's slow, but it works. ;)

hmm.. also, you could build yourself a custom gentoo kernel, i'm sure you can make it fit on a flash drive. You can read flash quite a few times, it's erase/write cycles is where you're limited to 1million or so (depending on the specific brand, but most are around there)
 
Originally posted by onaclov2000
hey I have the asus motherboard
but I don't know exactly how to set the boot to usb
it says something about scsi and something to do with lan I think (not sure exactly off the top of my head)
maybe time for a upgrade in bios or something????? I don't know
also what are you running yours at
mine is supposed to be 2.6 but is only at 2.053 right now can't git it any faster!!!!!
Click to expand...

What Asus board do you have? For USB bootdisks go here USB BootDisk
 
Originally posted by onaclov2000
I don't know also what are you running yours at mine is supposed to be 2.6 but is only at 2.053 right now can't git it any faster!!!!!
Click to expand...

What are you runnign at 2.053? The CPU? I have a P4 2.53Ghz 533 Mhz processor and the board (Asus P4PE Sata/GBlan) automatically sets the cpu speed for me, of course I can choose manual to set it myself but I don't want to overclock.
 
I bought a p4 2.6 processor with hyperthreading support and the motherboard is supposed to be compatible as I have read but cant get the dang thing going any quicker!!!!

tyson
 
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