howto boot from usb iso?

[Fernando Cassia]

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 9:06 PM, g <geleem at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> i have no desire to use anything that is dependent of ms.

I never claimed otherwise. U3 is propietary technology by SanDisk, for
Windows OS.

The fact that U3 CDemulation-on-flash-drive can be hacked to allow
replacing the cd image for any other cd image is, however, of use to
Linux users as it allows booting Linux from a flash drive on older
systems systems whose BIOS feature "USB-FDD" "USB-CD" and "USB-ZIP" as
the only options and which can boot from a real (physical) USB CD but
have problems booting from USB mass storage drives.

One such example I found on the net:
---
"My ThinkPad X60s does not boot from USB drives because of this. It supports
USB-FDD and USB-HDD (and USB-CD, which works), but insists that my USB drive is
a USB-HDD device, and thus fails to boot from the image on the stick."
---

So yes, U3 is a propietary, windows-only technology, but the fact that
it can be hacked to fit any ISO image (even linux) into its
cd-emulation partition is very useful, if you ask me. Even if you need
access to a Windows machine to do the initial hacking. (you could also
do it under virtualbox, I guess).

FC