Mark J Cox : Fedora Live image booting from my phone storage card

mark :: blog

30 Mar 2009: Fedora Live image booting from my phone storage card

I've recently started using a Fedora 10 Live USB image for emergencies: with it's persistent overlay and encrypted home directory support it's just perfect if we're out and Tracy has her small Asus eee 901 with her. Since the Asus has a SD card slot, I bought a cheap 2Gb MicroSD card and have been using that instead of a USB stick as the Asus is happy to boot from it and it's easier to fit inside my wallet.

I also recently bought a new phone, a HTC Touch HD, to replace my aging Mio A701. Although it has a Windows OS, it doesn't force you to use ActiveSync and you can set it to instead appear as a card reader when plugged in via USB.

It got me wondering if the Asus would boot from the phone. It does:

The phone comes with a 8Gb microSD card so plenty of room for the Fedora image without disturbing the other phone software, pictures, and so on. I just used the Live image creator to write the image to the microSD card, made it bootable, put it into the phone and set the phone to card reader mode. Now every time the phone is plugged in into a PC it appears to be just a bootable USB stick with Fedora live image installed. All I need now is a small retractable USB cable and then there is no need to carry around the separate MicroSD card (or a USB stick)

Created: 30 Mar 2009
Tagged as: fedora

4 comments (new comments disabled)

Title: Re: Fedora Live image booting from my phone storage card

Posted by: Jeremy

Time: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:49

Very cool and exactly the sorts of things we hoped to enable with the live images. Now if only more "portable storage devices" would be bootable from more random laptops/netbooks. Still want to have my live image stored on an ipod...

Title: Re: Fedora Live image booting from my phone storage card

Posted by: Adrian Likins

Time: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:47

Got this working with my phone (att tilt/htc whatever...). Though I used some 3rd party software to export the storage card as usb storage. That may not be required but I couldn't figure out how to do it. It seems to work okay, if not a tad slow. Cool though.

Title: Re: Fedora Live image booting from my phone storage card

Posted by: Karsten Wade

Time: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:08

One more nicety would be a phone that had a pop-out USB interface, similar to the Flip video. (http://www.theflip.com/products_flip_video.shtml) The various AC adapters that phone companies make money from really need to be replaced with a standard USB interface. They can find other ways to make add-on money. :)

Title: hello

Posted by: PamelaPhic

Time: Sat, 23 May 2009 18:25

Your acne blog is so informative ? keep up the good work!!!! By the way do you know of any good ance forums online?

Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my thoughts and opinions on my security work, open source, fedora, home automation, and other topics.

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