Boot OS from USB drive

[It's Not Lupus]

Can someone recommend a guide on how to do this with either Windows or a popular Linux distro? I have a laptop which I suspect either the drive or sata part of the motherboard is busted. I don't have any spare 2.5" drives to test or use right now. I just want to browse the web and read pdf files, maybe play video files.

 

[ArisVer]

Ubuntu, Mint and some other Linux distros, boot a live OS from their installation discs. I reccomend booting from a USB Flash disk instead of a DVD for this. If you have a large enough stick (8GB) you can even save some files on it. For this you need to make an extra partition on the stick of the space you have left.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You can get generic ChromeOS (Chromium) builds that install onto a flash drive and boot off of it.

 

[HOSED]

^^^^ excellent advise, unetbootin make this very easy with various Linux distros: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ once you launch the exe file, select distro and version, download it, select iso, drive ...
(also set space to preserve files)

 

[It's Not Lupus]

I forgot about unetbootin. I had to format the flash drive to fat32 for it to work. Using xubuntu live. Didn't know where to get the Chromium build - whatever.

 

[It's Not Lupus]

I've been using YUMI to create a single flash drive with multi live distros and also ultimate boot cd.

 

[Z15CAM]

Highly suggest you look into these USB Boot Tools:

HpFlash v2.0.6 [86] - USB DOS BOOT

Simple WinME BootDisk or hpflash1.exe or

USB & DVD - Win7 SetUp Tool: Windows7-USB-DVD-tool.exe

 

[ArisVer]

For a more "permanent" solution you can also make a full installation on a large enough USB stick. Keep things simple by making a single partition for all. The only drawback is slow read/write on the stick.