Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Aloha 1050 days ago
I often feel we missed a chance to make booting from removable media real easy.

If we had built ISO support into EFI, you could just copy an ISO (like a container) to a MBR or GPT partitioned thumb drive and boot it - no magic tools required, no bits to set. Yes FAT32 has a 4gb limitation, but there is nothing saying that couldn't be fixed with future versions of EFI, or by using multiple partitions on thumb drive.

Either way, I feel like an opportunity was missed.

1 comments

Ventoy is a magic tool that does exactly this, if you weren't aware.
Ventoy is absolutely magical, I can't recommend it enough.
I recall there's another one also.

They replace the iOdd virtual CD USB device in all virtualized cases. For physical servers, the iOdd virtual ISO USB drive is very handy.

I have a similar drive enclosure from Zalman, which takes a 2.5" SATA drive.
It's basically the same thing altough the iOdd predated Zalman by about 1-2 years. 2.5" case with a display, 2-3 buttons, and 1-2 usb-a connectors.

http://iodd.kr/wordpress/product/iodd-2531/

https://www.zalman.com/US/Product/ProductDetail.do?pageIndex...

> there's another one

You're probably thinking of Easy2Boot.

Maybe there's more than 2. I used (name forgotten) to boot a hard drive imaging utility from a USB drive.