Isostick: the USB memory stick that thinks it’s an optical drive • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 9:58 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #36

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.

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by exDM69 » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 9:59 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #36

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.

Grub can do this easily. This is how I upgrade my operating systems. I make a clean partition on my mdraid/lvm disk stack, put a minimal network install iso image on my old partition and enter some spells on the grub command line to boot. No external media required, but you need to have an operating system and a bootloader working already.

Grub manual is a useful starting point.

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

#73

Post by StavrosK » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 10:08 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #71

StavrosK wrote: post #36

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.

[deleted]

Can it do it with a Windows CD?

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

#74

Post by StavrosK » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 10:09 AM UTC

hahainternet wrote: post #58

StavrosK wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can, but it was a huge pain in the ass the last time I tried. It looks like things have moved on since then: http://u3-tool.sourceforge.net/

Fantastic, thank you.

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

#75

Post by overshard » Fri, Jul 29, 2011, 2:05 PM UTC

ryan-c wrote: post #57

rektide wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ cat /etc/fstab / /dev/sda2 ext4 ro 1 1

That really doesn't protect the device from an infected system - it can just remount it rw. You need a hardware write blocker to protect against a malicious system.

You don't need a hardware write blocker, the beauty of "burning" an ISO to a thumb drive is that the ISO format doesn't allow writes. There is no way at all to write to it unless you rewrite the drive itself in which case it becomes fairly obvious.