# How to Boot to USB (Linux or Windows)



## propper_geek (May 19, 2007)

Could anyone help with this?

I need to boot my PC to an external USB2 hard drive, with either Linux or WinXP. I have a late DELL with an Intel MB that supports booting to USB.

Is this possible? And is it just a simple matter of installing the operating system to the USB drive and then selecting boot to USB on startup?

Sorry if this is a stupid question.


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## Done_Fishin (Oct 10, 2006)

Mepis 6.5 appears to support booting to USB using their onthego technique .. primarily aimed at allowing a user to "take his mepis" and boot from another PC .. and look like his own setup on his own PC. I assume it's something like a live CD .. but booting from USB and with predefined installed programs, backgrounds etc ..


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## Geeksbydesign (Jul 10, 2007)

Another good "boot from usb" dristro is DSL (Damn Small Linux) or Puppy. Look at www.distrowatch.com for more information on those distributions.


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## K-B (Oct 24, 2005)

PCLinuxOS - www.pclinuxos.com
Supports booting from USB


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## shuuhen (Sep 4, 2004)

As long as your computer supports booting to USB and the option is set in the BIOS you should be able to boot to a USB drive. You'll need to make sure the external drive has a bootloader installed on it and that it's set to boot before the internal hard drive.

When I was installing Gentoo on my laptop, I first set up an install on my external hard drive so I could work out any bugs before moving it over to my internal drive. After I was able to rsync it between the two drives. You should be able to get GRUB to work, but there are other bootloaders that you could use (such as syslinux). I don't remember all of the details of how I configured grub.conf, but if you need help I could get my external drive out and see if the config file helps me remember everything.

I'm also booting Knoppix from a USB flash drive. For that I'm using syslinux (although I'm considering switching to GRUB).


Basically, any distribution should work as long as your BIOS and bootloader are configured correctly.


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