I’ve kept a USB flash drive or two handy for a while now, using them as glorified floppy drives. I’ve kept small files on them, not really exploiting their flexibility. Today I taught my flash drive to sit up and do tricks. I’ve now got it booting!

Before when I’d format the drive and attempt to boot it, nothing would happen. Now it works fine. The trick is to partition it to look like a ZIP drive, which most BIOSs understand. ZIP drives use drive geometry of 64 heads and 32 sectors, and vary the cylinder count based on their size. The tools in the SYSLINUX package clearly spell out the process in the README.usbdrive file.

Now I’ve got a flash drive which boots to SYSLINUX, provides me with a menu for booting a System Imager diskette, a Red Hat kickstart, or a Norton Ghost diskette, all on one drive. I’ll soon be adding some rescue CD-type tools to this list, too.

This will give me the ability to load and install software on systems with no CD or floppy, and to do it on a drive that easily fits in my pocket. If I wanted, I could even boot a full operating system from it, like Windows 95 or Knoppix (well, okay. Maybe Damn Small Linux instead).

Even though not all PCs will boot USB flash drives, I’m having lots of geek fun with this new tool.