Clever Geek Handbook

OS development for USB stick: some questions

My only O / S development experience before this was to create "Hello World" running from a floppy drive.

Now I need to develop a simple O / S to boot from a USB stick. And I have several roadblocks:

  • How can I write to the "sector" of the bootable USB stick? Are there any tools?

  • Do you know of any good tutorials or guides aimed at USB booting?

  • I need to be able to read files on USB; What is the standard file system on a USB stick? FAT? Does Linux natively use FAT to store / read files on USB?

NB: I'm only doing this for learning all the low level dirty tricks, so I don't want linux on a stick to do the job.

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  • There is no special boot sector, you just write the MBR up to the first 512 bytes on the flash drive.
  • There are many tutorials at Pendriveinux.com
  • FAT works in most (if not all) cases. While Linux can handle FAT, you can simply create another partition on the USB stick, which is ext2 (or any other non-journal filesystem), and let Linux work on it. The IT Solutions Knowledge Base contains an article on how to create a permanent installation of a BackTrack flash drive using an ext2 partition.


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Boot from USB stick



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Just some answers from my head (as I often deal with low-level disk structure):

  • You can just use a good hex editor that will let you write directly to disk (like HxD ), or roll your own application that uses the CreateFile API (or the Linux equivalent).

  • You can check out something like BartPE , which allows you to make an XP bootable image on a USB device.

  • USB drives are 99% FAT. Linux does support FAT natively for reading a USB stick.

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Just add information. Mac on Stick will be a useful thing. You can get a basic idea of ​​the file structure etc. With close examination, you should be able to solve most of the above problems. :)

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