Business Innovation Homepage > Business Agility

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Finally, I should make mention of Nirsoft, maker of a whole collection of incredibly useful and free utilities, all of which require no installation and will run from thumb drive or CD alike. They're perfect if you want to assemble a Swiss-army-knife USB collection of utilities; the program ProduKey alone, which recovers product keys for Windows, Office, and a number of Microsoft server applications, is a must-have.

Run A Standalone OS
It's not only possible to run standalone applications from a USB drive — it's also possible to boot and run a whole standalone operating system from one, too.

Why run a whole separate OS from a USB drive? Data recovery, for one: If Windows goes south, just plug in your drive, boot to it, and copy off any data trapped on the dead system. Another is if you're curious about migrating from one OS to another, and want to try it out in an extended fashion, but non-destructively — that is, without installing anything on a hard drive, or creating dual-boot scenarios or otherwise changing the configuration of the system.

Note that you can typically only run an OS from a USB drive if the system you're using it on supports booting from a USB device. Not every PC does — in fact, my own late-model Sony VAIO notebook (vintage 2006) didn't, much to my dismay. You might be able to upgrade the BIOS on a machine that doesn't currently support it and thus add it after the fact, but that's entirely up to the whim of the manufacturer; check with your computer or motherboard maker first.

The OS that's most commonly booted from a USB device would have to be some variety of Linux. Look no further than PenDriveLinux for tutorials on how to get many common Linux distributions running from a USB drive, including Ubuntu, SLAX and a few others. Pick the one that suits your needs best: Ubuntu is the most user-friendly, for instance, but DSL is the most compact (if somewhat confusing to work with for the uninitiated).

If you're already windows, can boot and run linux in a way that doesn t require you to reboot system but runs directly from within windows itself. this neat trick is accomplished by using the Portable Qemu virtual machine system. Another way to do this is to obtain coLinux, a special distribution of Linux that's designed to run on Windows as a Windows executable. Note that setting up coLinux is not anywhere as easy as the other methods described here, so this is for experts only.

How about being able to run Windows itself from a USB drive? Amazingly, it is possible — albeit with a bit of hackwork and patience, and with some scaled-down expectations about what's possible.

The most reliable and automated way to do this is to use BartPE, a utility that builds a copy of Windows's Preinstallation Environment (hence the "PE") from an existing installation of Windows. The PE is a mini-version of Windows that supports only a basic subset of Windows' functions, but it's still possible to do a great many things with it like perform data recovery or even run applications that don't need to be installed to operate correctly.

Note that Windows's licensing restrictions requires that you have a spare copy of Windows whose license you can devote to using in the BartPE environment; MSDN subscribers will probably find this restriction easiest to deal with, since they can typically spare an extra XP installation out of the pool allotted to them. Other people have created detailed instructions on how to take a BartPE installation and put it on a USB drive, although your mileage may indeed vary with this technique.

You can't just take an existing Windows installation and move it to a pen drive, but thanks to the intrepid work of a few foolhardy experimenters, it is possible to create custom installations of Windows that boot from a USB drive.

The folks at Ngine.de have done exactly that, and they document how to do it by modifying the Windows XP installation CD, with additional hints in their forum for those who want to run Windows from a USB flash drive.

One major limitation to installing Windows on a USB drive using this technique is that it will only boot and run on the system it was installed on — it isn't transferrable to another PC, which seriously limits its usefulness. But it's still possible to do some clever things, such as use it as an emergency recovery environment if BartPE doesn't prove to be flexible enough.

Maintain A Standalone Password Repository
I hate passwords. I hate having to come up with them ("Sorry, this password must be at least ten characters long and have at least one digit"), I hate having to remember them, and I hate trying to recover them. That said, passwords are still going to be used for a good long time to come, and many times they're the easiest way to secure something. Since a USB drive carries your data and goes where you go, it makes sense to use it as a password store, too — one that is itself protected against unauthorized use.

continued >>

Click here for more Business Agility articles