fellow slackers,

I got 2 64meg usb disks recently and I got them to work as "storage" in s9 after fooling around with them for awhile.

however it got me thinking that now that these usb disks are "disks" could they be made bootable. The benefits would be tremendous - sticking one of the bootable usb disk into the m$ machines and turn them into linux box instantly! no more comporise on m$ boxes.

I guess the following issues have to be resolved in order to achieve the objective:
1. the bios on the motherboard has to support usb booting
2. find a way to make the usb disk bootable (master boot record stuff ...)
3. load a compact version slackware/linux into the disk in step 2.
3.1 burn a cd with some linux apps such as X and Xapps that might be too big to fit in usb disk.
4. use the new os the same way as the old way - booting from hard disk.

once issue no 1 is resolved, since all the rest have been done before, it would simply be a matter of repeating past experiences right? put in another way, all we need is to get a list of usb_booting enabled motherboards, the project is almost done, right?

well, what do you think? I would appreciate any "constructive reading assignment" - web page links would be great.

thanks.

kayaker

Consider reversing the scenario; booting the CD and then mounting the USB storage. There are Linux ISO systems readily available if you desire to use them. I haven't tested any myself but I can look into it if you like. I normally create my own system disks to do what I need. Like emergency repair, data recovery, etc. In the boxed set for the Slack system, a ready run Linux system is provided on one of the CD's. I used the Slack 8.1 ready to run CD once as a base and upgraded the kernel to 2.4.19 for firewire support to create a backup and restore on a 40 GByte hard disk for my notebook. I haven't tried the Slack 9 ready to run CD as yet. It would probably work just the way it is, since it is based on 2.4.20 kernel.

When I create my own Linux system CD's, I normally use an easy way out. I modify the boot system ram disk as I require, and create file systems in different files that can be mounted under loopback. Then I burn the whole mess to a CD and boot it. Fairly quick and dirty but it works well. The files do not have to be decompressed, but it does take time for the CD drive to load the programs when requested. But I know it works on as little as 32 MByte RAM. Works good if you want a workstation without a hard disk or floppy drive, only a CD reader is required, much like a dumb terminal that can use telnet, ssh or minicom.

Perhaps it will be of some help. I am looking forward to serial ATA hard drives though for the plug it in and boot it up. Still rather pricey at the moment for my budget.

Excalibur

thanks. it is interesting the way you proposed! it might work well. as usual, the devil is in the details. here are some of the devils:

on the approach of booting from cd rom:
since linux uses a bunch of "bookkeeping files" such as log files, these files have to reside in either usb disk or hard disk. most of hard disk are partitioned for m$ windows boxes, and it is certainly NOT cool if i turn the hard disks into ex2 or ex3 format on someone else's hard disk. so i guess i have to configure the os to keep all the "bookkeeping" files on usb disk, right? is that how you do it?

on the "ready-to-run" slcakware:
could you provide the details on how it is done. i got a p166 notebook ready for converting from nt4 (it even got 96 meg ram but only 2 meg video ram)!

with the falling price of eletronics, it won't be long 1g usb disk will be within the reach of the mass, this might be our greatest chance of taking back computing to linux from m$ since we will be able to demostrate slackware on any new pc with usb booting enabled motherboad (soon all will be, i hope) without modifying anything on the hd thus leave the m$ boxes along until converting!

can anyone point me where to get myself educated in how to "boot from an usb disk and leave the hd alone"?

thanks.

kayaker