Fri, 01 May 2009

Booting via USB Key Made Easy
posted by Chip Witt

Man, how times change. I remember paying nearly $200 for a 2GB USB flash drive in 2006, and having people "oooh" and "ahh" about the amount of storage space available in such a small gadget. Same size drive, made better and faster, available for purchase online today: less than $10 before taxes and shipping. These drives are no longer an executive status symbol or tool for geek superheros, and the handiness of having one at your disposal in a pinch cannot be denied by even the most casual computer user. While most people use their USB flash drives to conveniently hold random bits of data to transfer between work and home machines, or to perform quick backups of critical, "I-am-so-dead-if-this-disappears" data, many do not know that it has become equally easy to use these drives for emergency booting of machines where the running state has changed from mere SNAFU to complete FUBAR. A state where time is of the essence, and you absolutely must recover information from a machine that is "Blue Screening" (or worse) for some unknown reason.

Now, there are reasons other than an emergency where one might want to boot from an alternate drive. Booting into a safe operating system for secure browsing when connected to a public network, exploring alternative operating systems, etc. are all valid. While I was recently researching the many Linux distribution choices out there, I came across two very useful utilities for making a USB drive bootable: the liveusb-creator and the Universal Netboot Installer. These are very cool finds because the process of getting a USB drive serviceable as a boot device manually is time-consuming, and difficult to do while simultaneously making an espresso drink.

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