Can i boot from a card reader same as from a usb thumb drive if my bios supports booting from usb? Just curious. Also, can i use an old mp3 player as a bootable thumb drive? btw...mine is an external reader that connects via usb Hope this doesnt sound too lame...
Not lame at all, I've been trying to do the same myself and I don't see any reason why it's not possible. I store and run apps from a SD/MMC camera card reader as it is, it's formatted as fat32 and easily transported in my pocket. I think you can make it bootable as long as your pc bios supports booting from it as a usb drive, Windows sees it as a removable disk drive. I run sandboxed Firefox portable,Opera usb and Advanced Tor from it and it's quite nippy. I would like to try an os on mine if anyone knows how. I'm typing this using a card reader with Firfox Portable sandboxed in Sandboxie; I've looked at Flashboot a commercial app and Makebootable freeware as possible solutions but my bios didn't have a boot option for usb. I put bootitng on to a card from a bootcd using Flashboot but couldn't test it. By the way bootitng sees the card as as a workable drive from it's boot cd
Running programs from is one thing but an OS - not sure it would be 'nippy' enough considering speed and max writes. boot from card reader
Thanks for the replies. If i could get w7 to reconize my card (it sees my reader) my plan was to try a small light distro like puppy or slax. What about the mp3 player idea? That should work shouldnt it? Waiting for the "just buy a freakin thumb drive! theyre cheap!" response.
I've run apps from an mp3 player before but some of them are strange formats some are like flash players and others like little disk drives with moving parts as far as I remember. I'm no expert.
drhu22, please post back with your experience - I can't remember where but I've read a post couple years back where someone does it on their laptop maybe a netbook. Strangely enough I have the option in my bios but never thought about it much.
I use Grub4Dos to boot Live CDs from SD Card. It's also possible to use Plop boot manager floppy(or CD) to boot from USB if the bios doesn't support booting from USB. I use SD Card rather than thumb drive because it has a lock switch which makes it read-only so I'm not worried about exe files on the card being infected by virus.
From post #4 "my plan was to try a small light distro like puppy or slax" But im having problems with windows 7 not reading my sd card From: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=288531 K]drhu22...what did you have in mind?
