Hi All:

I was configuring slackware 12.2, as part of the setup, after installing the distribution. I am putting this on a machine that has Vista on it and don't want to use dual booting.

During this process it asked if I wanted to make usb boot stick. I assume that this is similiar to making boot floppy so that you can re-boot your system without using lilo and dual booting, after the installation and configuration is complete.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find any info on it. Has anybody tried to do this? My computer's BIOS will allow booting from a USB port.

Thanks

Hey, welcome to LQ.
First, what do you mean by you don't wanna dual-boot; you mean your gonna get rid of Vista or what?
Yes, the USB boot stick works basically like a bootfloppy; and you can also boot Vista with bootusb or dual-booting by doing a expert lilo install(it's not that hard) to your MBR so you can boot either Slack or Vista.
That's good your starting with Slack; as you know it's not a "hold your hand" kinda distro like Ubuntu, but that's better as long as you have time to learn how to set it up and whatnot.
Just ask alot of questions in the Slack forum.

Hi:

Thanks for the response. What I am trying to do is use the PC Box without the hard drives. Vista is very nasty to dual boot with, even though it looks straight forward as in XP it has it problems with security.

What I have done is, using Slackware DVD distro and with a hard drive connected to a USB port, I installed the full distro on the USB hard drive. With it installed I then use setup to configure it. But then I have to provide a way to boot back into this system on startup.
Normally you use lilo and copy the boot record to the C:\ drive and add an entry to boot.ini.

I am trying not to do this since I don't trust Vista. I was thinking of putting one of the boot images "hugesmp.s" on a USB stick and then set the BIOS to boot from it. At bootup at the boot prompt I would set the root to point at the partition on the USB hard drive and hope for the best!!! This has it's problems because of using two USB ports.

I think the best thing would be to put the whole distro on a large USB stick and then configure lilo to make it bootable similiar to when you have a PC Box with only linux on it.

The trouble is I don't know how to tell lilo to do this in such a way that it doesn't mess up the Boot record on the C:\ drive for the Vista O/S.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks