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Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

extremetech.com

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Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#31

Post by rektide »

nodata wrote: post #27
rektide wrote: post #25

JUST FUCKING STOP IT. Don't use an ISO in the first place. Just make a USB drive with partitions and copy the damned data onto the USB drive. If you want a bootable partition, use syslinux, as detailed here: http://thefowle.livejournal.com/470622.html

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ automates the process.

I thought unetbootin was targeted towards single partition drives? The main advantage of what I've written is you get a nice FAT32 partition with syslinux, and secondary partitions on your USB drive for the actual OS; thus Windows (dunno about Mac) can use the drive normally, and it doubles as a bootable drive. Unforutnately unetbootin's "how it works" page is extremely sparse on detail. http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/howitworks

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#32

Post by techosaurus »

Did anyone else notice that the ISOs have to be stored on a FAT32 partition? Doesn't this limit you to maximum 4GB ISOs? The OS X Snow Leopard ISO (at least last time I checked) is about 8GB. Seems pretty limiting to use Fat32. If it's a self contained system, why not use a better filesystem?

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#33

Post by mbreese »

e1ven wrote: post #29
dfc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YUMI does this apperently. I had never heard of Yumi before, but I read the comments (and the article) so now I know about it. So given our new knowledge what does this do that yumi does not?

Yumi uses GRUB directly for the boot, so I believe it's limited to Linux only (AFAIK, Grub can't direct boot an iso)

Grub can boot just about anything... Windows included.

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#34

Post by dfc »

e1ven wrote: post #29
dfc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YUMI does this apperently. I had never heard of Yumi before, but I read the comments (and the article) so now I know about it. So given our new knowledge what does this do that yumi does not?

Yumi uses GRUB directly for the boot, so I believe it's limited to Linux only (AFAIK, Grub can't direct boot an iso)

Unless things have changed GRUB can boot other operating systems.

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#35

Post by StavrosK »

hahainternet wrote: post #16

The 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.

I have two of those sticks. Do you know if you can expand the partition to arbitrary sizes?

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#36

Post by StavrosK »

Why is it not possible to directly boot from an iso? It doesn't seem that hard, technically, although I'm sure there are good reasons against it, or someone would have done it by now.

It would be great if we could install unetbootin (or something equivalent) on a flash disk, select which iso to boot, and have it boot.

I know this is possible for linux-based images, but I'm talking about something generic.

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#37

Post by devmach »

mikezupan wrote: post #21
jfdi wrote: post #17

Guys, 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.

try burning multiple isos to a single usb stick.. next time read the article

So you need 150 different operation systems on your usb and computer ? I'm just fine with creating usb stick with most recent version of os when i need. And i think most people feels the same way...

If i can solve my problem with software and ordinary (=cheap) hardware, why should i pay 10 times more ?

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#38

Post by drivebyacct2 »

Why? Put Grub2 on a jump drive. It can easily present a list of ISO files to boot into as well. I mean, a drag and drop solution or a script to rebuild the grub menu would be nice, but not worth $100. Or am I missing something technical here?

I guess I don't understand why you need to emulate a DVD drive except for legacy operating systems. When I burn ISOs or images to a jump drive, they show up as DVD media in OS X and Windows 7, and the installers for every version of OS X that I remember and Windows 7 will all install perfectly from a jump drive.

It sounds like this is just a piece of firmware to do the trickery of processing the ISO. There are Sandisks that show a CD and a Flash drive and it's all done in partitioning, there's no software involved and it's undo-able via software.

I can only see this being useful if you have a BIOS that boots from USB-CD but not USB-HD. Again, I may be missing something. This sounds cool, but I'm not sure why exactly.

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#39

Post by gilgad13 »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #38

Why? Put Grub2 on a jump drive. It can easily present a list of ISO files to boot into as well. I mean, a drag and drop solution or a script to rebuild the grub menu would be nice, but not worth $100. Or am I missing something technical here? I guess I don't understand why you need to emulate a DVD drive except for legacy operating systems. When I burn ISOs or images to a jump drive, they show up as DVD media in OS X…

I hope it actually presents itself to the computer as an USB optical drive.

Now, is that worth $100? Probably not, as the number of computers which do support booting from USB cd. drives but not USB flash drives is pretty low.

Edit: Though as some other mention, some OSes on the other side of the equation are hard coded to install from the optical drive.

Re: Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive

#40

Post by m0nastic »

Earlier this year I was working building the network for a security conference and one of the guys had a similar device‡.

It came in really handy when we had to install all the servers (he had multiple flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.).

I've been meaning to pick one up, for the rare times when I find myself somewhere needing a bunch of boot disks; but I can vouch that at least this one is really neat.

‡ http://www.zalman.com/eng/product/Product_Read.asp?idx=431

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