NE1 booting up with USB keychain/jumpdrive?

Kelemvor

Lifer
May 23, 2002
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As long as you can detect USB stuff prior to booting and you have the standard bootup files on the drive, it should work. You can boot off a floppy connected to the USB drive so a flash drive connected to it should work as well.

But you'll probably have to do an F12 thing and pick the drive if it's in there.
 

Nocturnal

Lifer
Jan 8, 2002
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Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
What jumpdrive is big enough to put an OS on?

Uh the reason for booting off a jumpdrive is for updating bios, or minor little things like that. Nobody here is thinking about loading an OS.
 

DaWhim

Lifer
Feb 3, 2003
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Originally posted by: Nocturnal
Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
What jumpdrive is big enough to put an OS on?

Uh the reason for booting off a jumpdrive is for updating bios, or minor little things like that. Nobody here is thinking about loading an OS.

I was thinking about loading an OS. with a 1gb flashdrive, I guess you can do it. hope you are not on usb1.1 :D
 

FreshPrince

Diamond Member
Dec 6, 2001
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Originally posted by: Nocturnal
Originally posted by: Gobadgrs What jumpdrive is big enough to put an OS on?
Uh the reason for booting off a jumpdrive is for updating bios, or minor little things like that. Nobody here is thinking about loading an OS.

That is semi-correct.

I would like the core system boot from the usb drive, but no, I will not have the swap file or log files on the flash drive..it would kill it fast! Unless...I figure out a way to install a linux distro that supports JFFS2 :D

-FP
 

LAUST

Diamond Member
Sep 13, 2000
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I made a floppy disk with Norton ghost (PC-DOS) and just copied the disk over to my Jumpdrive. with those files in the root it boots up every time.
 

labrat25

Senior member
Jan 7, 2004
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would the system boot any faster if you got a decent sized usb 2.0 drive and installed the OS to it?

i've been kicking around the idea, but not quite sure (and all my stuff is 1.1 so any bandwidth/memory tests suck ass compared to the hard disks)
 

RossMAN

Grand Nagus
Feb 24, 2000
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Originally posted by: LAUST
I made a floppy disk with Norton ghost (PC-DOS) and just copied the disk over to my Jumpdrive. with those files in the root it boots up every time.

That's what I did and it worked.

I only bootup with USB keychain whenever there is a problem or I need to do some maintenance.
 

Kelemvor

Lifer
May 23, 2002
16,928
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Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
What jumpdrive is big enough to put an OS on?

THey have Jump Drives that are over a gig in size. Plenty to have an OS on it.


I know a guy working on stripping enough out of WIn98 that you can get it to load into Memoery and run from there. Faster than crap if he gets it working.
 

FreshPrince

Diamond Member
Dec 6, 2001
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hmm..my drive must suck :(

I popped in a DOS 6.22 install disk and made the usb device a system drive. the command said system transferred.

however, when I try to boot it, screen says missing operating system :(

not sure what else to do, normally when you run sys c: it should make the drive bootable.

Also, in the bios, I enabled usb boot. For boot priority, I can see that the usb device is viewed as a hard drive with the label: [], this is strange, but it disappears when I disconnect the device so I know this is it. Is there anything else I'm missing?

-FP:)
 

MaxFusion16

Golden Member
Dec 21, 2001
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flash ram is no where near as fast as harddrives, they are not designed for high speed or stressful applications. I believe the transfer rate of the average usb 2.0 flash ram is about 10 megabit/s
 

MaxFusion16

Golden Member
Dec 21, 2001
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Originally posted by: FrankyJunior
Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
What jumpdrive is big enough to put an OS on?

THey have Jump Drives that are over a gig in size. Plenty to have an OS on it.


I know a guy working on stripping enough out of WIn98 that you can get it to load into Memoery and run from there. Faster than crap if he gets it working.

someone in UK has already done that, I believe he managed to strip windows 98 down to around 50mb, now let me see if i can dig up the article...
 

lo5750ul

Senior member
Jul 18, 2001
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76
Originally posted by: FreshPrince
hmm..my drive must suck :(

I popped in a DOS 6.22 install disk and made the usb device a system drive. the command said system transferred.

however, when I try to boot it, screen says missing operating system :(

not sure what else to do, normally when you run sys c: it should make the drive bootable.

Also, in the bios, I enabled usb boot. For boot priority, I can see that the usb device is viewed as a hard drive with the label: [], this is strange, but it disappears when I disconnect the device so I know this is it. Is there anything else I'm missing?

-FP:)
The partition on the key has to be active. Use Fdisk to remove the partition, reboot, fdisk a new partition, format /s and then you are good to go. If it does not boot after that, then you have a bios/usb key controller issue.

 

lo5750ul

Senior member
Jul 18, 2001
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Originally posted by: labrat25
would the system boot any faster if you got a decent sized usb 2.0 drive and installed the OS to it?

i've been kicking around the idea, but not quite sure (and all my stuff is 1.1 so any bandwidth/memory tests suck ass compared to the hard disks)
While it is possible to do this, it is not practical. The flash memory used in a USB key has a finite number of read/write operations that can be performed before the memory becomes unusable. While this number is in the millions, when you put an OS onto the key that performs thousands of read/write operations as a matter of course, it is not long before your key becomes worthless.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
8,808
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Originally posted by: lo5750ul
Originally posted by: labrat25
would the system boot any faster if you got a decent sized usb 2.0 drive and installed the OS to it?

i've been kicking around the idea, but not quite sure (and all my stuff is 1.1 so any bandwidth/memory tests suck ass compared to the hard disks)
While it is possible to do this, it is not practical. The flash memory used in a USB key has a finite number of read/write operations that can be performed before the memory becomes unusable. While this number is in the millions, when you put an OS onto the key that performs thousands of read/write operations as a matter of course, it is not long before your key becomes worthless.

Well, the logical thing to do would be to have your OS (whatever it may be) start by creating a virtual RAM drive and just run off of that, or copy itself to a temp directory on a fixed disk if there is one available. Certainly you could dump a small Linux distro (or the main parts of the Win98 kernel and any device drivers it needs) completely into RAM.