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BoofFlash, make USB drive bootable

March 15, 2009 — BarryK
I've been working on a new utility to make a USB drive bootable and to install Puppy on it, for new installations. I'm doing this to finish off some things that I had left hanging before. Awhile back I was working on a concept that I called ComboFormat, but it never got completed. Now along comes yet another technique, to write an ISO image into a USB drive, so it is time to get it all organised. I've called this utility BootFlash. Snapshot:



This requires the latest version of Syslinux and the Makebootfat package.

There are also fixes required for the 'init' script, that I'll implement tomorrow.

This will be in the alpha3 Woof-Puppy, coming soon.

Note, I fixed some bugs in the Universal Installer, it was broken in Woof-Puppy alpha2.

Note, the name 'Boot Flash' or 'BOOTFLASH' is also used for the Flash memory on motherboards, or driver firmware. I decided those names and purpose don't conflict with my use of the name.

BootFlash is finishing off what I was doing back in February/March 2008, a year ago. Not just me, also JustGreg was doing a lot of testing to try and find out why some USB drives booted and some didn't. Jesse also helped us at that time. My blog report on that work is here (do a search on "just greg"):

http://puppylinux.com/news/news400a5-400a7.htm

Comments

qemu


UNetbootin
Username: Paul
" Hi there, I tried to post this in an earlier post, but it didn't work then. In any case, there is another good ISO to USB-disk program that I always use for Puppylinux (and Xubuntu), called UNetbootin. It works flawlessly for me.. http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Re: Unetbootin
Username: BarryK
"Thanks for that link to Unetbootin. I see that it uses Syslinux. I'm downloading it right now, very interested to see if a USB drive can be made to boot on a couple of my "difficult" PCs!


Tags: woof