dual boot, on a flash drive?

just wondering, is it possible to put multiple OS installs on a single USB flash drive, and maybe still have space for files on it, as well? mine is 16gb. but also, i don't know how to install an OS onto a flash drive. i ordered an eee 901, it should come next week sometime, and i want to experiment with different kinds of linux and gain experience with that, of which i have absolutely none of atm.

do you need to partition the drive, and is that even possible on a flash drive? does it need to be completely clear of everything else to install an OS?

 

Yes, you can partition a USB stick and boot multiple OSes off of it. You can probably fit 2 or 3 full linux distributions on 16GB depending on which you choose. Good luck

Whether you clear it entirely or not is your choice, you can either resize the existing partition(s) or start fresh.

 

how do you partition a flash drive, and, er, how do you install an OS in it?

 

It's easy to resize/repartition from the linux installer.... installing the OS is a bit of a different story, that'll be dependent on which you want to install... A good place to start is pendrive linux

Note that there's a lot of guides there for installing FROM usb, you want to install TO usb, so make sure to keep that in mind...

 

so if find something to install from, when i start installing it is there an option to select which drive to install to, or what partition?

 

Yes, the installers differ between linux distributions, but most allow you to resize partitions. All of them have a partitioning step where you create and set the mount points of the partitions. It's important to make sure you are partitioning the USB stick and not your internal hard disk, but beyond that it's pretty straightforward. There are loads of tutorials on that site I linked and others. It'll require a bit of reading no matter what distro you choose.

 

awesome, thanks for the help, guess i've got some reading to do.

 

Yeah, post back if you have a specific problem, somebody here will help! Good luck

 

I am trying to determine if my pc will boot from a usb drive. I plugged in an empty usb drive, restarted, entered bios, and I am still only showing three boot devices, cd/dvd, hdd, and gasp, floppy drive. No usb option. Am I correct in assuming that booting from usb in not an option on my pc, or is there another way to check it? Thanks. I had hoped to try running Linux from a usb drive to test it out as the live cd is so slow that it is almost unusable.

 

Hmm... it should show 'removable devices' in your boot order or somesuch, if not, you probably can't boot from USB. That'd have to be an older machine, you might try looking for a BIOS update.

 

Yea, it is 5 1/2 years old. The latest BIOS update from the manufacturer is a 2005 version, which I have already done. There are no removable devices shown in my boot order. There are only 3 devices shown in my boot order, floppy, cd/dvd rw, and hdd. I also have a dvd ROM drive and it is not shown either. I guess I am out of luck?

 

Yeah, if you can't add removable devices to your boot order you're probably out of luck, sorry

Edit: This isn't uncommon though for older notebooks, so it's not anything you're doing wrong..

 

Rep for you. I really appreciate all the help you have given me and I hope you won't mind answering more questions as I go along. Thanks.

I have to decide whether to partition and install it on my hdd and dual boot with XP, or buy anoher hdd and install it there and swap back and forth in the BIOS. What do you think about that? As soon as my wife goes to bed, I'm going to check the BIOS in her laptop and see if it can boot from usb, then maybe I can test it out there. It is only a few months old so hopefully it will be able to boot from usb.

 

Yeah, I lurk here all the time, I'll answer anything I can

It's pretty easy to resize your windows partition to make space for linux partitions and dual booting, but you'd want to thoroughly defragment your disk and run a chkdsk first to be safe (make sure there are no filesystem errors before resizing).

Anything with USB 2.0 will most certainly boot off of USB, so you should be all clear there.

 

I have usb 2.0 on my pc too and it doesn't show in the boot order. I am going to check hers out soon. I gave you rep but it is still showing the same number under your name, why's that? I still don't understand how the rep points are determined and how many rep points I have to give.

 

Hm, that's weird, guess there are obvious exceptions. It's something I've noticed, not anything about USB 2.0 having anything to do with booting.

For the rep points, I see your rep in my user CP (thanks ) but until my post count goes higher I won't get more bars... I think I have to break 1k to get another. I'm not exactly sure....

Edit: There it goes, just went from 4 to 5, I dunno about the bars though. The rep system totally confuses me too...

 

So you're an East Coast night owl too. I'm in MA.

 

Haha, nice, yea, I'm a bit nocturnal

 

I'm going to read up on this link now. Thanks for the info.

 

It'll be a lot faster from USB but still not as fast as from hard disk, better than the Live CD though...

 

Can I set up the usb drive on my desktop and run linux on my wife's laptop with it since I can't boot from usb, or should I do the whole thing on her laptop? I have two choices, I can either set it up with widows on my machine or hers( if it will work that way) or I can set it up using the live cd on either pc but only use it to boot from hers. Or should everything be done on the pc that will actually be able to boot from usb?

We are going out for a while, so I will probably be doing this later tonight. Any advice you can give would be great.

Do you think running Mint from usb will be a lot faster than the live cd? Will I actually be able to use it?

 

alright, so i downloaded eeebuntu and i think if i can burn it on a disc i can boot from that and install it on my USb drive, right?

but i don't know what to put on the disc, i have all of these folders and they go over the 700mg my disc can hold. do i need all of them? i have:

.disk
casper
dists
install
isolinux
pics
pool
preseed

and some individual files,

autorun
md5sum
README.diskdefines
ubuntu
umenu
wubi

which ones do i need, or do i need all of them?

 

You can set it up on any PC you'd like, the only limitation would be if you install a 64-bit linux distribution onto the USB stick you'd need a 64-bit CPU in the computer you want to run it on. It should be usable from USB, the reason it's so terrible from CD is that the read latency on CDs is horrendous since it needs to reposition the lens and spin to the right sector. USB has lower throughput than a hard disk, but it'll be more usable than the Live CD by a long shot.

 

Did you download the ISO? You should burn it as an image instead of extracting the contents, since it needs info from the ISO itself to be able to be bootable. I don't know anything about eeebuntu but I just checked out all the download links and they are ISOs.

 

Here's a tutorial for installing eeebuntu onto a usb stick: http://www.liliputing.com/2008/12/how-to-install-eeebuntu-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html

 

Success!!!! I am posting this with Linux Mint running on a usb stick from my wifes laptop. It is a 100 times faster this way than using the live cd. It booted and was at a usable desktop in about 2 minutes instead of 12+. Now I need to see what all of this stuff is. I wish I had a bigger flash drive. I used a 2 gb drive and I only have about 11mb free. It's good enough for me to test it out, as long as she doesn't mind me stealing her computer.

 

I am having sound and video problems. The video is choppy and the sound is not clear at all, almost like it is in slow motion. I really have'nt read too much about how to use anything in Mint. I guess there will be a longer learning curve since I have only used windows.

 

Depending on your video card you might need additional drivers.

Sometimes tweaking /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base for your audio is all that's needed. You can probably find some other users with the same problem if you search for the right terms.

 

I just booted from a Ubuntu USB using directions linked to above. Easy as pie.
Lots of questions coming though...

I'd like to do the same for Mandriva, the instructions for which are:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/make-your-own-portable-mandriva-flash/

My question: are the extra steps of remastering and burning a new ISO necessary? IOW, can I just do it directly to USB like with Ubuntu? And if not, why would I have to make my desktop/application selections before remastering?

 

You can probably skip those parts. Step 3 is "Customize your desktop, add/remove programs etc to make the system how you want it" so it's probably optional. I'm not sure what ships with Mandriva but maybe there aren't a lot of apps on the stock ISO.

 

alright...i'm having a bit of trouble. i had tried UNetbootin before i couldn't figure out which was the actual .iso, nothing i have is a .iso file.

second, i used a default distro from the program (puppy) and had it install that on my flash drive, and it said it worked fine (it also did when i tried that with eeebuntu) and that it was installed, but (both times) i plugged it into my computer (my eee pc hasn't arrived here yet) and when i went to boot from it i got "boot error". what am i doing wrong?

also, i tried copying everything i got from eeebuntu onto my flash drive and booting from that, same thing.

 

To use that tutorial you need an .ISO image... it can be found here for the standard version or here for the netbook remix.

If you're getting a boot error straight away, it's because there's no valid boot sector on the disk, so in other words it's not been made bootable. If you get an error after the kernel has expanded, that's a different story.

 

alright, i think i have that, but i unzipped it with winRAR and it didn't have the .iso at the end of the file. so if i stick THAT on the flash drive, should i at least be able to boot from it, even if i can't install it back onto itself?

because the CD-Rs i have are only 700mb, it can't fit the 800mg+ of the .iso. do i just need a different kind of disc for it to work properly?

edit--alright so i read more closely, saw it said DVD-RW and found some DVD-Rs, i'll try that now.

 

You need to burn the ISO directly to a CD. Burn it as an image. An ISO is an exact image of a CD, I'm not sure how else to explain it... it doesn't get burned as a file onto a CD, it is a CD image itself. Here's a guide I found from a quick search: http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm

 

if i use nero and use the bootable DVD option that should work right?

 

i got it to boot, but, not much further than that. it said it was starting caldera (don't know what that is), eventually said is couldn't find any fat32, end exited, and ended up with something like "DR DOS A:/>_", i could change it to a different drive but i couldn't really do anything from there, so booted back into windows.

 

I think that DR DOS is what Nero uses as an OS by default... that's not the right way to do it. You still need to burn the ISO as an image, it's something like Recorder->Burn Image in the full version of Nero or Disc Image from Nero Express

 

okay, well, i got it working...i think. i did also get my eee pc today, and i did install eeebuntu on the flash drive, i think, i haven't been able to get the eee to boot from it.

but, big problem first. now my main computer won't load without the flash drive plugged in. something about GRUB...when i have it in, and i boot from my regular drive that xp is installed in, it gives me a list of OSs to choose from, xp being among them, but without the flash drive in it won't boot, saying GRUB couldn't load or something. what did i do?

 

It sounds like you installed GRUB to your MBR on your hard disk instead of to the USB drive. The easiest way to fix this is to boot with your Windows installation CD/DVD and select recovery console or recovery mode for Vista. Select the recovery console and run fixboot and fixmbr for XP or for Vista, run bootrec /fixboot. You should have installed GRUB to the USB disk, which if you used the regular ubuntu installer requires hitting the 'Advanced' button before the final step of the installation, I'm not sure if it's the same for eeebuntu.

 

oh, well...i don't know where my disc is. so i probably can't boot off of the USB until i try that again, right?

so, all my files would still be intact once i find the disc, right?

 

All your files are still intact, it's just the boot sector and/or MBR that needs rewriting. The fixboot command will rewrite your boot sector, and the fixmbr command will restore your master boot record on your hard disk (from the recovery console booted from the XP installer cd).

 

that's good...i also found my CD, when i run it through windows it says my windows install is updated too far so it won't load, when i boot from it all i can do is do a clean install...is there something i can burn onto a disc that will work?

 

If it's a regular windows disc, you need to boot with it and select recovery mode. See Option 2 in this KB article.

If it's not a regular windows disc, like the kind of factory restore disc that ships with some computers that only lets you wipe the entire disk and start from scratch, you can use this method since you can boot windows XP, to install the recovery console from the windows CD, reboot, and then use Option 1 or Option 3 from the previous link.

 

i typed in the command to the run prompt from there, it said again that "setup cannot continue because the version of windows on your computer is newer than the version on the CD..."

edit- once i closed that, a new window popped up, it may be working...

 

You need to boot with the CD. Not run it from windows.

 

well, somehow i made it to the recovery command prompt...but while it was installing the recovery, there were some missing files, i skipped them, hopefully it will work...do i do both fixboot and fixmbr, and is there a specific order, or should i not have skipped all those missing files?

 

What kind of missing files? I'm not sure how to answer that...

In any event, the order doesn't matter. Once you do fixmbr it should boot normally, fixboot is optional on XP.

Edit: Make sure you're not doing a repair installation, that is entirely different, and not what you want to do.

 

alright, well, seems to be working, i just did fixmbr. thanks! now to give eeebuntu another go...

 

Cool, glad that worked out. You might try using UNetbootin instead of booting with the CD and installing that way, since it'll eliminate the problem you just experienced.

If you do install from the CD again, this time make sure to look for the Advanced button (in ubuntu it's on the next to last step, after partitioning, in the lower right hand corner) and install GRUB to your usb stick instead of hd0. I'm not sure if it's exactly the same in eeebuntu but I suspect they use basically the same installer.

 

okay, it almost works...my keyboard is useless until ive booted into SOMETHING.