Category: Geeks r Us
I want to boot my computer to a USB drive. How can I do this on a windows XP machine? What about a mac?
Hello there!
In order to allow direct boot from usb, on pc-type machines, you usually need to change something in the bios setup or hit a key, during post, to bring up a menu of bootable devices, from which you select the usb drive. I have two pc laptops, a Dell Inspiron, and an Asus netbook. On the Dell, I can select the boot device by hitting 'f12' during the startup (before the hard drive starts booting). On the Asus, the 'magic' key is the 'escape'. Before I could do this, on the netbook, I, first, had to have someone go into bios setup and disable the Boot Boost (TM). This bios setup stuff is independent of the os on the hard drive; there's no system loaded at this part of the sequence. This also means no bios setup screen will talk. This should be a one-time operation! It's much easier to boot a usb drive on my iMac. When you hear the startup chime, press and hold 'u'; the usb should start booting. Similarly, you can boot a live cd by using the 'c' key.
HTH,
Dave
OK. Let's hope my chrome image works on a mac. My dell laptop probably also is f12, but I'll fall back on that if the mac fails miserably.
I tried a Chromos image, and couldn't get it to boot anywhere. I wrote the image with the 'dd' command, on the Ubuntu machine. I know these images are supposed to be bootable, and that some blind folk have used them. If you get a bootable and working Chromeos running, I'd like to hear about it. I looked at the result of my 'dd', and the structure looks like that of a typical Linux root filesystem.
I used the program that (by the way) is completely inaccessible that is on the website for the chrome os image. I asked a friend for help getting it to write. I'll tell you if it works.
What OS does the progam run in? I have Linux and OSX; no Win here. May have to ask on Help. Maybe I'll try unetbootin or the Ubuntu startup disk creator app.
The program works on windows, but there are mac instructions as well. I just didn't feel to great with the idea that one wrong number could destroy my hard drive, thanks.
The Mac instructions probably involve the use of the dd command, and, you have to be careful not to over-write your hd; that would be a horrible, irreversable mistake. I forget what the usb volume is in Macos. On my Ubuntu thing, it's /dev/sdb, with a '/dev/sdb1' partition which, if I read it right, is the entire volume. I'm not as familiar with the BSD (also OSX) scheme of things.
The reason I used windows...