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Can I boot from a USB flash drive (memory key)?

April 26, 2017boot flash drive key memory USB

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Can I boot from a USB flash drive (memory key)?

2 Answers

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Yes, using the Linux-based boot disk. (To USB-boot the DOS disk, see Eugene’s instructions.) I got this working on a 256M Sandisk Cruzer Mini, but the procedure should be the same for any USB drive. I used a Linux machine to prep the drive. You can probably use a Windows machine to do all of this stuff; if you figure it out, feel free to let us know and we will update these instructions. First, I needed to repartition and reformat the drive, because the original partition table was an unholy mess which confused the boot loader. I plugged the drive into my RedHat 9 Linux machine and used “dmesg” to see that it was autoprobed as /dev/sda. (It may have a different name on your system, especially if you already have SCSI disks.

0

Posted

Yes, using the Linux-based boot disk. (To USB-boot the DOS disk, see Eugene’s instructions.) I got this working on a 256M Sandisk Cruzer Mini, but the procedure should be the same for any USB drive. I used a Linux machine to prep the drive. You can probably use a Windows machine to do all of this stuff; if you figure it out, feel free to let us know and we will update these instructions. First, I needed to repartition and reformat the drive, because the original partition table was an unholy mess which confused the boot loader. I plugged the drive into my RedHat 9 Linux machine and used “dmesg” to see that it was autoprobed as /dev/sda.