Been trying out Puppy Linux, a 50M linux distribution that can boot from a USB flash drive.
I've put it on my Billionton USB Flash key. Here are the results so far:
- Boots on main work pc if I use a floppy disk to load the USB drivers (an old PC with a BIOS that cannot boot from a USB key).
- Boots on old work pc that has an addon PCI USB card, again using floppy.
- Doesn't boot on my Dell Inspiron 500m when using the BIOS setting to boot from USB, it just says 'MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM' and locks up. The Dell doesn't have a floppy drive so no way to try that out. Puppy can boot from CD and that works just fine. The problem is either the Dell BIOS or the key's 'boot sector' not playing ball. I set the key up using the script that runs on puppy itself, I am suspicious that this is the problem.
Once booted it is cool, it has enough utilities for a good play. I launched a console and did:
mkdir /mnt/c mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/c ls /mnt/c
and I had access to my Windows 2000 C directory, no logging in, no fuss. It boots in a minute or two.
The two PC's it is working on won't boot from CD's, at least not CDR's, probably as they are >4 years old, so USB is the only option.
As puppy only uses 50M of my 512M USB key it will be a handy thing to carry around with me.
There is lots of helpful advice on the website.
Peter's Moblog
