Posts Tagged ‘USB flash drive’

How to boot a Server or Workstation from a USB Flash drive or USB External Hard disk

Sunday, August 28th, 2011

All the HP ProLiant MicroServers I’ve purchased without CDROM/DVDROM drives, so how did I manage to install all the operating systems, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Oracle Solaris 11 Express, FreeNAS, VMware ESXi 4.0 and ESXi 5.0 quickly and easily onto the servers.

Well quite simply, I made  my USB External Hard Disk bootable, and copied the ISOs onto the USB External Hard Disk, connected to the HP ProLiant MicroServers, and booted the ISO CDROM from the USB External Hard Disk.

This has the following advantages

1. The read time is much faster than conventional CDROM/DVDROM and USB flash drive.

2. No requirement to burn an ISO image to a CDROM.

3. Keeps all your ISOs in one place.

If you’ve downloaded the software already from the internet, as a download, you already have the ISO ready to configure, otherwise download and install ISORecorder, a brilliant little application, which just creates an ISO image.

Next you’ll need one of the follow applications, and these applications will do the rest, just make sure you set the computer’s BIOS to boot from USB!

1. UNetbootin (Download Link)

UNetbootin

UNetbootin

2. YUMI Multiboot MultiSystem (Download Link)

YUMI Multiboot MultiSystem

YUMI Multiboot MultiSystem

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