Old desktop and laptop computers may have been maufactured without an ability to boot from a USB device. Often they were designed to boot from internal hard disk, CD-ROM or floppy disk. Nowadays, booting from a USB device is commonplace, so it is helpful to do so on an antiX system.

A boot manager named Plop is often used to create a bootable CD-ROM or floppy disk. Starting up a machine with either of these displays a menu at boot up. One of menu entries enables booting the operating system on a USB stick attached to the machine.

After antiX has been installed to the hard disk in your machine, the hard disk becomes the ususal way in which you boot up your system. In this case using a bootable CD-ROM or floppy disk is a less than ideal method. There is a better way...

When antiX is started from a hard disk, a menu is immediately displayed. This offers a range of choices of how antiX can be started. The following method describes how to add an option to boot from USB to this menu.


Set Up Plop
1. From the Plop web site (
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.plop.at/"
linktext was:"http://www.plop.at/"
====================================
) download the current versions of:

• plpbt-5.0.14.zip
• plpcfgbt-0.11.zip

2. Unzip both of the zip files

3. Place plpbt.bin and plpcfgbt in the same directory

4. Open a terminal in that directory and run the command Note: These steps have configured plpbt.bin to boot from USB and hide an extra uneeded level of menu.


Add plpbt.bin to Your antiX System
Do the following as root
1. Create the directory /boot/plop

2. Copy plpbt.bin to the directory /boot/plop/


Add the additional entry in the boot menu
1. antiX Control Center-->System-->Edit Config Files

2. Select the menu.lst tab

3. Add the following entry after the first stanza that begins, title antiX...Note: (hd0,0) refers to the first hard disk and the first partition on that disk.


Reboot with a bootable USB stick plugged-in and select the appropriate menu entry.




Edit: typos

cool!

I agree, pretty neat. Thanks!