Using USB memory key as boot directory for older computer?

[Jon Pruente]

I've just started playing with FreeNAS (well, it's BSD...), and it
shows USB thumb drives as a regular USB mas storage just like it would
in Linux.  My mobo just boots right from it as it would a regular ATA
HD or CD drive.  I know occasionally one might need a certain program
(syslinux) to write boot blocks for the drive, but for the most part
with a newish thumb drive it should "just work".

I've got plans to play with DSL and Puppy and others on a thumb drive
at some point soon.

Jon.

On 6/28/07, Brian Kelsay <ripcrd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/28/07, Jonathan Hutchins <> wrote:
> > On Thursday 28 June 2007 06:50:17 am Leo Mauler wrote:
> >
> > > Can anyone direct me to some assistance in getting a
> > > distribution installer (CD distribution) to recognize
> > > the USB memory key at boot time, so that it can be
> > > used as /boot? Also, does the USB key need to be
> > > initialized as bootable before beginning the Linux
> > > installation?
> >
> > Does the BIOS allow booting from a USB device?  If not, it's not going to
> > work.  I suppose you could boot off of a floppy, and redirect to either the
> > USB or HD.
>
> He said it would boot to USB.  On modern mobos, you toggle this in the
> BIOS to put the USB first in line.  Oh, Leo, you shouldn't have to do
> anything to the USB pendrive to make it bootable other than format it
> as ext2/3 if you want to.  They all start out life as Fat32, due to
> their size and expected use in a Winders box.  you should be able to
> leave it as Fat32 as long as your fstab identifies it correctly and
> sets it as r/w, but you may prefer to change to Ext2/3.  :-)   Not
> sure if you should not do the journaling on the drive and just do
> Ext2. Anyone else have thoughts on this?
>
> Brian
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