Corsair Blog - Linux

In my previous blog posting I covered how to install a Live Boot Linux distribution to a 32GB Flash Voyager GT USB flash drive using Unetbootin, but this isn’t the only way to create a Live Boot USB drive. A quick trip to Pendrivelinux.com will reveal a treasure trove of mini-guides for different distributions of Linux, which are very useful in the event that Unetbootin doesn’t work for you.

For example, I’ve found that Unetbootin fails to correctly install the Syslinux boot files to a USB drive that has been turned into a Fixed drive and split into multiple partitions, as described in my blog post Create separate partitions on your Corsair USB flash drive. I don’t why this doesn’t work, so if any Linux gurus out there can explain how to get this working then that would be great!

One of the many great uses for the latest range of high-capacity, high-speed Corsair Flash Voyager GT USB flash drives is to use one as a Live Boot drive for one of the numerous portable distributions of Linux. You might think that a USB flash drive won’t be fast enough to use as a system drive, but thanks to the rapid read and writes speeds of the new Flash Voyager GTs, running an OS directly from the drive is surprisingly smooth. And using the free application Unetbootin, it’s also incredibly simple. We’ll show you how.

The benefit to a USB Live Boot drive is that you can essentially carry around a complete operating system with applications on your Flash Voyager GT. This can be useful for simple troubleshooting tasks, for example if your current OS decides to ‘misbehave’, or to hot-desk between multiple computers and not only carry around all your important data, but use the same desktop environment too.