[ale] Thumb drive games

tom tfreeman at intel.digichem.net
Wed Jan 14 01:47:28 EST 2009


On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, aaron wrote:

>
> On 2009, Jan, 14, , at 12:15 AM, tom wrote:
>>
>> I purchased an 8 gig thumbdrive to experiment with using one as a boot
>> disk for a new eeepc900? (I think I got that model right).
>>
>> In any event, making a bootable thumb drive turned into an adveenture.
>
> Both Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 9 include utilities to install onto
> a bootable USB drive.  Learned this from last month's Linux
> Format cover article, plus Brian Pitts made an Ubuntu USB key
> (in less than 10 minutes) as his Pecha Kucha presentation at
> December's ALE Central solstice celebration.
>
> On a system with Ubuntu 8.10 installed, it's a menu item
> System // Administration // Create USB Startup Disk
> Only other thing you'll need is a an ISO of an Ubuntu Live
> CD available to the system (or have your 8.10 Live install
> CD in the drive).
>
> Fedora 9 has a standalone utility written Python & QT that can be
> used to create a bootable USB install from either a Linux system
> or a WinDisease box, possible from an intel Mac as well. Again,
> only other thing you need is an ISO of the a Fedora Live CD.
> I expect the utility is still included in Fedora 10, too.
>
>
>> Just like typing on this eeepc is. I had noticed on some web sites
>> that
>> some thumb drives are not suitable for use as boot disks, but not a
>> word
>> about why. I think I know at least one reason - some person/idiot
>> added an
>> emulated cdrom drive to the San Disk micro cruzer 8 Gig I was
>> using, which
>> got seriously in the way of making a bootable disk.
>>
>> Anybody else run into this kink of idiocy?
>
> Using the Mac disk tools I was unable to remove the (stupid, useless)
> auto mount DVD partition on a San Disk USB key last week.  Didn't have
> a Linux system at hand, or I might have been able to just fdisk the
> thing.  So long as the CD or DVD partition is there it may be impossible
> to make the key bootable.
<snip>
My efforts with fdisk under Ubuntu were not successfull at removing that 
useless CD/DVD partition. Ubuntu was recognizing it as a CD, or at least 
that was how I interpreted things.

I was able to get going with another drive, but was posting as an effort 
to fill in the documentation

And yes it helped, as I don't feel like I was imaginig things


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