Can I boot a computer via usb from a cellphone

Hi Guys,

I have a Palm Pre that runs a version of Linux 2.6. This phone boots it's self up with bootie and something similar to iphone's iBoot. This phone when connected to a computer can act like a fat32 usb drive. To explain further, the device boots off its own memory 8GB in total, it reserves all the behind the scenes stuff (linux) about 700 - 1000MB. And through linux allows a PC to (mount?) access a folder or partition as a fat32 fs. So if this is possible I'm asking if linux can mount that partition or folder as a bootable fat32 fs, where the receiving computer's bios can recognize and jump to a "virtual" boot sector?

I'm not just asking from a cell phone point of view but also a computer to computer boot. If anyone has even played with this idea please share.

Thanx

I think your idea is theoretically possible but practically the Palm and PC each have its own different CPU, therefore different instruction sets, and so the boot code that work on the Palm will not run on PC. You can boot up a PC based boot loader like Grub or syslinux but I don't think you will get anything useful out by loading the Palm's boot loader into the PC.

However I would be pleased to be proved wrong.

I figure there's 2 ways this will work:

I hope I can mount a folder/partition on the cell phone as a bootable fat32 that I can put a virtual MBR in the first sector that tells all connecting devices to jump to a PC friendly boot loader. I think this will work but I don't know how to do it and I don't exactly know what the PC does to the cell phone during boot up.

OR

The PC actually looks for the raw first bytes and finds the real boot sector, this phone runs Linux so the PC should be able to read and understand the language UNTIL it gets to the part that starts talking cell hardware ( the jump to a file?). How can I modify the current boot code to make a conditional jump to a different boot file (in fat32 partition) if the reader is NOT a Palm Pre?

I know the boot sector has to be 512kb and end a certain way, when it comes to jumping to byte 0xblahblah precede the code with "read machine ID and if not PALM change jump to 0xthatotherone"?

Thanx for taking the time to look @ this!!

are you asking if you can boot a usb attached pc to web-os ? probably not.

but as long as the phone looks like an external harddrive (or thumb drive ...) it should boot whatever distro you put on the blank space.

fedora has a wonderful live-usb thumb drive installer.

for example i used my creative zen vision:w to boot up knoppix-live-usb.

Sounds like you are talking about a net boot. Which is certainly possible, but keep in mind that your PC (hopefully) has a different processor than the palm, so you will need a different kernel and a different system.
Research net-booting if you are really interested.