I think the big difference here is that we get the potential to put multiple disks on a single usb device. From the technicians perspective I'd like to rid myself of the big stack of cd's i have that i use to install windows, or run diagnostics, or any of those things. I remember thinking to myself last year, man if only someone made this. And low and behold here it is. I may have already talked my boss, (he's the owner, I'm the Technician Manager.) Into pledging for 5 32 GB models. (Something like 1,100 dollars ish.)
Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
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Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#12To all the people doubting the use of such a device, many OSs don't currently work "out of the box" with unetbootn and other such tools.
I've personally had problems with RHEL and Windows XP, and I can guarantee there are others.
With RHEL, you had to copy the rpm repo on the CD to another storage medium and manually set up the repo. This is because the default repo is set up to detect an optical drive, mount it, and use it as a repo. That's a pain.
Windows XP has problems with continuity between the restarts involved in the install process.
Emulating an optical drive would fix those problems and allow any ISO to run unmodified.
A final benefit is the multi-ISO support on one drive.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#13Does 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.
That's not the problem it's trying to solve. AFAICT, if you can't boot from USB, you're still out of luck.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#14Please 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…
No. This is useful for stupid OS-es that don't like being on a USB stick.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#15"Uses fat32"
So how long before MSFT demand a $10 patent fee per device ?
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#16The Sandisk U3 series of drives can already do this but in a slightly less integrated fashion.
This was also a nice attack vector on Windows machines as you could insert a usb stick with attack code on the CD partition, which then wrote its output to the flash partition.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#17Guys, why is this newsworthy... I recently made a bootable ubuntu usb stick after a couple google searches and commodity $15 8GB stick from BBY sale bin.
Maybe I'm missing something important here, but the technology to burn an ISO to a USB is freely available why would anyone spend extra money for this rig.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#18Why would I pay for something that I can do with unetbootin?
Does unetbootin allow you to choose from multiple ISOs to boot now? It didn't last time I checked. I realize there's ways around that (like manipulating syslinux config files: http://tazbuntu.blogspot.com/2009/05/multibootin-with-unetbo... ) though.
I like to use YUMI for booting from one of many ISOs on a single USB stick: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
This kickstarter project's idea of having the USB stick handle all this for you would be great.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#19Does 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.
on newer macs at least, the efi bios will not boot to certain usb hard drives, but will boot to a usb cd/dvd drive.
Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive
#20At 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.
I think the principle is that you give direct traffic to the important link rather than the content aggregator.