[geeks] Running a computer from a USB flash drive

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: sammy ominsky <s at avoidant.org>
>Date: 2008/04/17 Thu PM 11:31:48 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Running a computer from a USB flash drive

>On 18/04/2008, at 06:51, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
>> Have any of you guys ever tried running a computer from a USB flash  
>> drive?
>
>I'm booting a FreeNAS system off of internal USB.  As long as your  
>BIOS can handle it, it's no different than any other bootable device.
>
>I find it sort of amusing that my 2TB storage center boots from a  
>thumb drive.

I've got a windows server that I'm playing with, and I had some extra drives in it (unformatted/unassigned in Windows), so I shut it down, booted FreeNAS off a 128 Meg thumb drive, and now I've got the other three drives as a RAID5 filesystem to play with - when I'm done, I pull the thumb drive, reboot, and up pops windows server, and I can re-assign the drives.

In a more permanent machine, I'd boot of an internal IDE -> CF adapter, but this worked out great for a few days of tinkering...

Lionel