Live CD : can it be put on a USB stick instead ?!

[Michael T. Richter]

On Sat, 2007-17-03 at 03:08 +0100, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:

> Or maybe could it be possible to mount the ISO, then copy all the files
> in it, onto the stick, and make the stick bootable ? How can one make a
> USB stick bootable, I rush to ask ??


That depends on your BIOS.  If your BIOS allows you to boot from USB
devices, then you can boot from a USB stick like you can from any drive.
But...


> Anyway, you got the point...basically, is there ANY way at all, to use
> the Live "CD" from a USB stick/external hard drive/whatever USB storage
> device ?


I made a bootable version of Xubuntu on a LiveCD (from Dapper).  It was
a bit of a pain in the ass to figure out, but some Googling and hacking
around with config files made it possible in the end.  The problem,
ironically, was that it was so painfully slow that, although faster than
a CD, it wasn't sufficiently faster to warrant the significantly smaller
set of machines I could boot onto it from.

The problem was that, for some reason, there was almost constant writing
to the USB stick as I used the computer (this despite setting up the
system with no swapfile, etc.).  Anytime it wrote, reads stopped dead in
their tracks.  In the end it turned out just not to be practical.

Maybe newer USB sticks are faster, though.  I tried this back when
Dapper was new and on a USB stick that was about a year old at the time.

-- 
Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter at gmail.com> (GoogleTalk:
ttmrichter at gmail.com)
We should sell bloat credits, the way the government sells pollution
credits. Everybody's assigned a certain amount of bloat, and if they go
over, they have to purchase bloat credits from some other group that's
been more careful. (Bent Hagemark)
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