29 Jan
2008
29 Jan
'08
9:51 a.m.
Chris,
Bootable thumb drives are now almost mainstream, and thus way OT for
this list. See the current issue of PC Mag (even more OT) for the
ultimate bootable thumb drive. A thumb drive is just a CF card
permanently mounted to a USB plug and many modern BIOS have settings to
boot many devices (floppy, CD, HD, etc.) from a USB port.
The step you seem to be missing is making the partition on the CFcard
active. Only an "active" partition will boot. AFAIK, this cannot be done
with the tools provided by XP but there are other partition programs
that will do it. (Your search engine is your friend.)
[Jay, this should take care of it.]
Jim
Chris M wrote:
the computer in question, though I didn't mention
it
specifically, can indeed boot off of a compact flash
card. I only mentioned the lt and all because that's
all I have to create (hopefully) the bootable card.
--- Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote:
On 11/01/2008 01:20, Chris M wrote:
____________________________________________________________________________________
Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page.
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs I'm stumped. All I have to work with is a
WinXP
laptop
that doesn't boot off anything special in
particular.
The CD drive yes, but that's about it. I once
was
able
to make bootable CD's w/early versions of
Norton,
but
I doubt that would work for a compact flash card.
You can't boot an OS from a CompactFlash card in a
card reader slot.
You have to have it in an IDE-to-CF adapter (which
is a simple passive
device, there's no electronics involved) connected
to your HDD
controller, so the computer sees the CF card as an
IDE drive. If you
set it up that way, then you should be able to
format it as bootable.
You certainly can using Linux, and it should be
possible using DOS
booted from a floppy. Of course, this might be
problematic on a laptop!
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York