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Boot any and all ISO images from USB drive #
I spent days looking for a way to boot any and all ISO images from a USB drive. I envisioned being able to simply copy any bootable CD or DVD (Windows installers, OS X boot discs, Linux Live CDs and recovery discs like Knoppix, etc) to a USB drive and boot it normally. Some of the possible solutions I found included:

The more robust solutions were generally quite tedious, and none of them worked for all ISO images, as explained here: Boot "any" ISO image or boot "all" ISO images.

Having recently stumbled upon a floppy drive emulator, I started looking for a USB CD/DVD drive emulator and finally found a way to boot any ISO image from USB drive: the iodd 2501. It is a 2.5" SATA drive enclosure with an LED display to select the desired ISO image. Simply create a "_ISO" directory in the drive root and dump your ISO images inside. That's it! The enclosure also has a write protect switch and eSATA support.

The iodd 2501 has booted every ISO image I have thrown at it, on both PC and Mac hardware. When I first tried using the device, the LED would only report "NO-_ISO", despite having followed the instructions exactly. It turns out that formatting as FAT32 in OS X's Disk Utility was the problem; I simply used fat32format under Windows and the problem was solved (NTFS is apparently supported with a firmware upgrade).

I purchased mine from LinITX; they've got detailed instructions, videos, and great customer service.

UPDATE 1: John Rothlisberger wrote in to ask if ISO images can be changed on the fly during an install. After testing with a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2 disc set I am happy to report that they can.

UPDATE 2: Curtis Reno has started a neat project to build an open source USB CD emulator using inexpensive components. Announcement | Fourm

/misc | May 08, 2010



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