Boot up your PC from your Flash Drive

User: inactive Posts:

For a long time, I've heard about booting from a flash drive.
I think it's even come up here in LG.

Well, I finally DONE IT.
I bought a 2 gig Flash Drive on sale for just $39.
A friend of mine who already had a bootable flash drive,
shared with me the program to make the little Flash Drive
bootable. It came from HP.....who would'a thunk it?
The program is available for immediate download at:
http://tools.house-tech.net

Enter the "Drivers" section,
then click on "USB Stuph"
and download "HP USB tool.exe"

You'll need a source for the boot system files, etc.
I just used my own 'Windows ME Boot Disk'.

Then I put on all the files from my Ghost boot disk.
Now, when I boot up from the Flash Drive (some settings in the Bios had to be changed to make it look at the Flash Drive for the system files)
I get my Ghost menu on the screen.
I was also able to add all my Utility Programs that I use during a computer install/tuneup to the drive. I've still got almost 900 megs free.

I encourage any and all to add your own experiences with bootable flash drives, to this thread.

Cheers!
Shadow Cool

zlim · Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 2422

None of my BIOSes support booting from a USB and with 6 computers in the house, I'm not ready to buy another one, LOL.
Instead I settle for portable FF and running apps on a USB drive like here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1849710,00.asp
nice when you are on a strange computer to bring along your familiar apps.

User: inactive Posts:

I have some real mixed emotions about these new mobo's.
Adding Flash Drive (USB) boot capability is a great step forward, but on the dark side, some mobo's like the Socket 939 mobo's for the new AMD processors, have a new HD controller that Norton's Ghost 2003 can't see through to determine what drives are installed. SO, Ghost 2003 just won't run on those mobo's. Big Bummer!

So let me make a blanket statement to which there may be some exception, somewhere. "Ghost 2003 will not work on any PC running the Socket 939 motherboard."

EDIT: July 2007
Upgrading Ghost 2003 to build 793 will fix the above failure in Ghost not seeing the hard drives on the 939 mobo.

Y'all have a nice day now, Y'hear?

Shadow Cool

knightrider56 · Joined: Jan 18, 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Near Tampa Florida

I was wondering. Can the same set up let you boot from a SD Flash card? Such as a 1 Gig like used for cameras and other Flash devices?

I was thinking if I put a Flash Card multi-reader into a next new computer build, I could boot from an SD card as a emergency back up instead of a CD or Floppy disk.

Or even build a very small experiamental tower with no hard drive and 4 Gig of Ram and a pair of Flash reader/writers as my I/O instead of CD drives. using one reader for my OS and the other for programs and saving/storage. Do you think it would work with 4 gig or larger SD flash cards?

One of the previous notes said using the "Flash" Drive for a boot device with a AMD 939 would not work. Is there a possibility It might work with the newer M2 socket CPUs and Bios or is the same problem there also?

My other idea was that if I put all my programs on a flash sd cards as backup instead of CDs I could save a load of space and maybe have only a small HD to hold my OS and a few programs and do all my storage on SD flash cards. That should work with the AMD CPUs and Bios right?

Any thoughts.

Maybe these are crazy ideas given the OS and Bios available, but I am a AMD CPU sort of guy. I wanted to bounce them off someone with a lot more computer savy and experience before I went off and poured money into an endevor that would fail or backfire in my face.

User: inactive Posts:

WOW....how did you ever find this year old thread?

I've not tried what you suggest, but why don't you give it a try?

The HP program is still where I said it was in my last post here.

I'll try it too, on this end.

I'm now running a AM2 motherboard from MSI and a new dual core AMD Athlon processor.

I have a flash card reader in my new case, and I'm about to try making that flash card bootable.

During the initial boot process, I must press the F11 key for a complete boot menu which shows all possible locations for boot information.

I'll try it and let you know how it went.

Laters,
Shadow Cool

brat · Joined: Jun 05, 2003 Posts: 2326

Camera Olympus Digital Model No. SP500UZ.

I have a Olympus MaUSB-200 USB read/write Memory Adapter.

I put the 1 Gig Memory Card in a slot put the Adapter in the USB then i can drag the Photos to the Desktop for printing.

Maybe your brand of Camera has the same Adapter then you won't need a Flash Card multi-reader.

mrs12brat

User: inactive Posts:

Duh! We're talking about booting up a PC with an SD flash card.
Not putting pictures on one.

OK, I've blown off the last hour trying the SD Flash card on my own PC.
It works!
I used my Windows ME boot floppy as the source for the boot info and used the HP program to apply that to my flash card. I chose FAT-32 for my format. It only put the boot info on the FD, but once back in windows I was able to copy the rest of the files from the floppy disk to the flash drive.

Here's the boot menu from my MSI motherboard.

<<-- click to expand

and here's the screen when I boot up my system from my newly made flash (SD) card. I'm glad I bought extra flash cards.

<<-- click to expand

So, in answer to your question about booting from a flash card, the answer is an unqualified YES.

My buddy and PC Guru tells me that this is not anything new. Flash Memory based drives are now on the market.

He has a 2 gig PNY flash drive that boots up a system and runs many different programs. He also has booted Windows 2000 from a flash drive.

The rule of the old mechanical hard drive as the King of data storage, is quickly coming to an end.

I'm sure that before I die, I will be running a PC with NO hard drive in it at all.

Cheers Mates!
Shadow Cool

goretsky

Hello,

Whether or not a computer can boot from a solid-state disk (USB-based flash drive, SD/MMC, CompactFlash and so forth) varies based on a number o factors, such as the motherboard's chipset, BIOS, motherboard USB controller, device USB controller, device ATA interface emulation, boot block, OS and so forth.

Just as there are some computers which do not boot from CD-ROM disc drives or can only boot from them in certain configurations, you may find that you have to use specific versions of your motherboard's BIOS, USB to flash disk adapter and brand of media.

If you have a spare PATA (or SATA) port, you could try using a PATA (or SATA) to flash memory adapter, which should handle the drive interface side of things. You will still need to use media which provisions the ATA interface correctly (I have found that very old CompactFlash and SD cards do not always have these fully implemented). Addonics is one company which makes a variety of such adapters. They are fairly inexpensive.

One thing to keep in mind is that while access times with flash memory media is very quick, the sustained transfer rate is usually quite slow compared to a modern hard disk drive. Flash media seems to work best when booting small operating systems, such as Linux distributions which are customized for appliance building.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

User: inactive Posts:

It's such a pleasure to at last have a mobo that will boot up from every drive and flash drive in my system. (See my boot menu in my above post).

For some time now, I've had my Ghost backup program and cleanup batch files on a little 64meg (bootable) Flash Drive. I was also able to add my Windows ME Utilities disk to that drive, so now it's become "Dual Function".

From that flash drive I can burn a CD copy of it using Nero. That works great on the PC's that won't boot from a flash drive.

Laters!

Shadow Cool

knightrider56 · Joined: Jan 18, 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Near Tampa Florida

WOW thanks for the info. I am going to get my multi-card reader/writer and run some tests of my own.

I was looking at the new small Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline Desktop with AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 X2 Processor 4000+ and couldnt figure out if the AMD chip used is a M2 socket or not. I went to the AMD site and still couldnt figure it out. Maybe Im having a senior moment, so I asked HP in an email. will know soon if it is or not. If not I am going to ask them why not. M2 would be a better choice.

I was sort of thinking of building an experimental tiny tower using this mobo and it should work well with the HP program you mentioned.

Maybe I can build it to boot from a SD Flash Chip.
Besides the fact that this little computer already comes with the SD Flash reader and writer built in so I draw my conclusions from that.

unless you can recomend a small mobo that will handle the AMD X2 M2 chips, like the on this HP should have, instead of the HP mobo?
maybe with higher onboard RAM capability?
Idea

User: inactive Posts:

If you find out that your AMD chip is indeed AM2, then you can find a real nice mobo from MSI. I'm using the "MSI K9N Platinum". It wasn't the cheapest board in town (at $139) but exactly what I needed. It will take 8 gig's of DDR2 ram. I'm currently running two.

I'm not sure exactly what it is that you're trying to do, but good luck anyway.

I like to color outside the lines myself and sometimes I'm not quite sure what I'm doing either.

Right now, I'm working on a VBScript or .reg script to disable that very annoying UAC thingy in Vista. It's not too hard to do manually, but a script that would run in two seconds would be a lot better. If someone already has one.......please share....

Later,
Shadow Cool

knightrider56 · Joined: Jan 18, 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Near Tampa Florida

I was looking at the mobo in the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion Slimline Desktop with AMD Athlon 64 X2 Processor 4000+ for its very small size,

and the HP folks did indeed say that this is a AM2 socket board.

It has a good bus speed....2000MHz....but...

the problems I see are there's no parallel port, nor any serial or game ports, and no floppy; plus only one PCI-e port available for upgrades or change-up...like adding a sound card (instead of built in sound), or installing a NIC for a wired connection instead of using the wireless.

I guess because its so small, these are the trade offs, but i was wondering if you knew of another small mobo made by the folks that make your MSI K9N Platinum or another equally good manufacturer that would maybe make a small board but have more of the missing features I noticed on the HP board ? I want small but I want options. And I need usb2 ports.

I may still go with this board if I find no other board this small or close to this size.

User: inactive Posts:

I'd have to say that the HP board is a wash. You may well need all those things that you have already said that it doesn't have.

Asus and MSI both have small footprint mobo's that have all sorts of extras.
Just go to their web sites and see for yourself.

My MSI mobo has six SATA2 ports, one dual-drive IDE port, one floppy drive port (supporting just one floppy drive Crying or Very sad

) and 8 USB ports, and, two LAN ports, a parallel printer port and one serial port and even a Firewire port.
It also has things that I won't use in a million years. Wink

And, it supports the AMD socket AM2 64 bit CPU and 8 gigs of DDR2 ram.

For my needs, now and in the foreseeable future, it more than fills the bill.

Just go shopping for what you need!

Cheers,
Shadow

User: inactive Posts:

Does anyone else have any personal accounts of booting from flash drives or SD camera cards?

I currently have my Ghost boot disk on an SD card. It boots my system and runs Ghost just fine.

Cheers Mates!
Shadow Cool