How to make the mp3 player/ext drive act like a bootable CD?

[screwd01]

I have a iriver h120, 20gb and can be used as an external drive. i formatted the drive and made a 2gb FAT partition so it can be bootable. I have an old laptop that has no CD Drive and i'd like to put Linux and/or XP on it. I have the Ubuntu Linux install CD .iso and I'm wondering how to make the H120 bootable to install it.

 

[imported_Stew]

I don't know if it's possible to boot from usb...

 

[screwd01]

more info
The laptop did come with a usb cd-rom but i left that in my college apartment 300miles away..

in the BIOS, USB is set to boot before HDD, and under HDD the toshiba in the iriver shows up. I select for that to boot before the laptops HDD. When it tries to boot from the toshiba is says something like "No operating system installed" this is because i dont have the right files on the drive.

 

[ND40oz]

here's gateways instructions:

link

HP has a utility for it, probably easier:

link

 

[corkyg]

It really depends on whether or not your system BIOS allows booting from a USB device. Few do.

 

[screwd01]

mine does, i just need to know what files will make it posssible.

i also have a cruzer mini usb key now 512mb, anyone know how to make that act like an install disk?

 

[theMan]

in order to boot, it needs to have a bootable program on it such as an OS. just install the OS on it, then it will boot. its not a bios issue, since the computer is booting from the drive. there is just nothing on the drive to boot.

 

[imported_Stew]

Load the iRiver device into another computer, burn the .iso to a cd (or extract it to a hard drive with a program like WinRAR), and simply install it from that computer onto your iRiver.

I don't think there's any way to install a large linux distro onto a computer with no cdrom drive. But if you do it on another computer first, and then use the iRiver on your lappy, it should work, and redetect hardware, etc.

 

[screwd01]

sounds like a plan...gonna try it now