USB key drive dual-boot?

March 13, 2006 6:46 PM

Work gave me a 1GB keydrive for carrying personal files. What I'd adore is using it to carry around a rescue disk such as one of the many tiny bootable Linux distributions.

However, I know that I will need to use the keydrive to move files (>100MB in size) from a windows to Mac OSX to Linux workstations. One bootable Linux partition, the rest in the lowest-common denominator filesystem is FAT32/VFAT.

The sensible answer would be to partition the USB keydrive, use the first 60MB partition for a bootable Linux mini-distro, and format the rest vfat. Except that Windows insists on only seeing the first partition and keeps asking if I want to format the entire 60MB of this 1GB keydrive.

What's the proper way of having my bootable rescue USB key, and my big storage space too?

posted by Mozai to Technology (11 answers total)

Here's a starting point recentlty posted at Lifehacker

posted by Agamenticus at 6:50 PM on March 13, 2006

http://www.althack.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=27
posted by Agamenticus at 6:51 PM on March 13, 2006

Mac OS X won't boot from USB without hacking Open Firmware.
posted by cillit bang at 7:12 PM on March 13, 2006

(sorry, misread the question)
posted by cillit bang at 7:13 PM on March 13, 2006

Best answer: If Windows insists on seeing the first partition, why not make the first partition the big one for data, and the second one the 60MB one? lilo or grub in the MBR can happily point to the second partition.
posted by mendel at 7:14 PM on March 13, 2006

I have a side question that is related: Is it possible to put Knoppix on a 1GB thumbdrive?
posted by Dean Keaton at 7:56 PM on March 13, 2006

Don't know about Knoppix but damn small linux will run off of a thumb. I have it on my 512mb drive, haven't ever tried to boot from it but it does load up DSL inside of Windows just fine.
posted by caution live frogs at 9:49 PM on March 13, 2006

Can't linux boot and run off a FAT filesystem?
posted by Good Brain at 11:09 PM on March 13, 2006

Response by poster: I was going to use INSERT because of the plethora of recovery tools, and because it's 54MB in size. Knoppix can fit easily inside 1GB because it fits easily in 640MB for the CD-ROM iso file.

mendel: I think I tried that, but I don't remember what went wrong. I'll try it again and if it works you'll get a best answer.

Other options are a partial image of Ultimate Boot CD and the huge list at FrozenTech.
posted by Mozai at 5:28 AM on March 14, 2006

Response by poster: Agamenticus: I should've said that I've already successfully made a Linux-bootable USB key drive. INSERT, which I mention above, makes it as easy as "fdisk ; usb-install /dev/sda"
posted by Mozai at 5:32 AM on March 14, 2006

Response by poster: mendel: GRUB would be very nice, but live-cd distros of Linux tend not to use GRUB. Turns out that extlinux, the boot manager of choice for live-cd distros of Linux, is very much like GRUB. After installing the files (including extlinux requirements) and compresed iso image to /dev/sda2, I ran "extlinux /mnt/sda2/extlinux" and it picked up that /dev/sda2 was the appropriate disk partition. Editing /mnt/sda2/extlinux/extlinux.conf appropriately, and after using mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1, everything is now hunky dory.
posted by Mozai at 6:18 PM on March 14, 2006