Booting from USB-Key or Multimedia card

[tommydl]

I'm getting a laptop with an cardreader, and I'm thinking about gettin Knoppix (the full 700mb version) to boot from a 1gb Multimedia or SD card.

Anyone whos doing this? Is it usable or will it be too slow?

[tommydl]

Or whatabout if I get a Compact Flash ATA card and plug in my PCMCIA slot? Since these devices show up as regular IDE it would be alot easier to setup and boot from right? Simply doing a "dd if=/dev/knoppixcd of=/dev/flashcard". Will this work?

[garyng]

if your notebook supports booting from USB, it is pretty easy, though not necessary KNOPPIX.

You need a kernel+initrd that supports usb and usb-storage. That is all. I have booted such setup before.

I remember someone once create a KNOPPIX derivative for this.

As for speed, it really depends on what hardware you have, USB 2.0 with newer CF should be even faster than booting from CD.

[OErjan]

depends on how your BIOS is made/configured. some can bot from USB mass-storagedebvies and some can boot from a pcmcia CD i guess there COULD nbe a way to make a SD card act like a Floppy, cd, usb... it might even be seen as a extra hd.