USB Booting with Linux

USB Booting with Linux

This piece long overdue.

The real reason is our strike and I was doing three times the work I had not done at home and was organizing my living room and workshop.

These were done on a leisurely pace not in a rush as when I was working.

My dog took a lot of time of me which he really enjoyed and the little squirrel is a bundle of energy.

All the same I got all my computers USB bootable one by one.

I have used only two methods.

Method 1

I. UnetBootIn and get the stuff copied to a USB stick.

this has disadvantages.

UnetBootin takes over the flash drive entire and one cannot have storage space except of course home folder.

It uses only FAT partition

One cannot get the GRUB installed with your existing operating systems in the hard drive booted.

The real advantage is one can make any iso image bootable provided that one has enough space in the USB stick and your RAM is at least 1 GiB.

Anything less is not advisable.

Method 2

This is the method I prefer since in an emergency, the hard drive systems can be booted in a breeze or if they are not working one can boot up with the external hard disk and start doing repair work from there if the operating system used in the USB hard drive is packed with Rescue utilities .

One can use Rescatux.

But here I will take PCLInux as an example.

Its USB Creator is now solid and very good (latest download after Texstar took a back seat).

One has to use the PCLinux USB Creator

1. The advantage is it uses Linux Partitions.

2. It writes the GRUB already in the Master Boot record.

3. One has to do the installation once one has finished all the installation in the Internal Hard disk/s.

4. It has storage more space.

5. In my case my archived isos reside on the spare NTFS partitions

6. It is easy carry in your front shirt pocket and one cannot lose or misplace it like the Flash Drive.

7. Password protected and safe with your critical data 

I have not given the details since all that is there in this blog under different titles.

Other reason is to thank the PCLinux team for doing a good job without making a big ha ho.

Thank YOU PCLinux Guys and Girls.