Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
1–10 of 75 posts
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#2At least link to the kickstarter project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elegantinvention/isostic...
Looks awesome though, I'll grab one. And I bet that I'm able to change the microSD card ;)
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#3At least link to the kickstarter project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elegantinvention/isostic... Looks awesome though, I'll grab one. And I bet that I'm able to change the microSD card ;)
They link to it in the article.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#4Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be something that mostly solves a problem related to old BIOSes, no? Because I can "burn" .dmg and .iso etc. to SD cards or USB memory sticks and boot them just fine from EFI on my MacBook, as if they were optical discs or external hard drives. I know this is possible with most modern BIOSes, too, so apart from the actual hardware identification of the device, cleverly claiming it's an optical drive, what valuable utility does it provide, and what problem does it solve?
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#5Or you could just use http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as...
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#6Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#7Why would I pay for something that I can do with unetbootin?
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#8Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be something that mostly solves a problem related to old BIOSes, no? Because I can "burn" .dmg and .iso etc. to SD cards or USB memory sticks and boot them just fine from EFI on my MacBook, as if they were optical discs or external hard drives. I know this is possible with most modern BIOSes, too, so apart from the actual hardware identification of the device, cleve…
That support is not a required part of the EFI spec. It's possible to emulate it anyway, but quite complex: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/4957.html
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#9Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be something that mostly solves a problem related to old BIOSes, no? Because I can "burn" .dmg and .iso etc. to SD cards or USB memory sticks and boot them just fine from EFI on my MacBook, as if they were optical discs or external hard drives. I know this is possible with most modern BIOSes, too, so apart from the actual hardware identification of the device, cleve…
Even on traditional BIOS systems, you can do tricky things like use isohybrid to generate an iso that can be either burned to optical media, or directly dd'd to a thumb drive and booted (using syslinux).
Another approach (my personal one) is to use a combination of grub/memdisk on a thumb drive to provide a list of bootable isos.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#10Does this really solve the whole problem? I've seen BIOSes (even on reasonably recent machines) which were unable to boot from an USB key, but I'm not sure that they would all have been able to boot from an USB optical drive either.