Making of bootable USB stick, or CD - how to?

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Everyone,
I've had my new Samsung 860Evo SSD in the system for a few months now and was intending to replace my older 850Evo with it. I never got around to it since I do not have an emergency boot "disk" handy.

What I mean by that is the following: I do not have a bootable CD, nor a USB stick that will give me a maintenance OS/2 partition.

Having said that, I do have such a partition on my SSD itself, which I regularly use. Uber-quick boot to a CLI, easy access to any sort of recovery toolsets, etc. But since I'm about to pull a SSD out (where that MAINT partition exists) I want to be able to have a fool-proof Plan-B as well.

So what are the available utils to make that happen? Is it possible for me to simply "pack up" my MAINT partition and toss that onto a CD? Seems to simple, haven't tried it though, I figured I would ask here first before I end up with a stack of coasters! 

As always, thanks for any suggestions!

[Dave Yeo]

Don't you have access to a ArcaOS build? That would be simplest. USB and some CD boots require setting up a ramdisk and actually booting from that. Anyways there's various programs for booting a CD at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fos2%2Futil%2Fstartup perhaps bootos22_9-26.zip

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Don't you have access to a ArcaOS build? That would be simplest. USB and some CD boots require setting up a ramdisk and actually booting from that. Anyways there's various programs for booting a CD at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fos2%2Futil%2Fstartup perhaps bootos22_9-26.zip

Yeah, I do Dave, but I honestly didn't want to mess around with that given how much older and version-of-a-version-of-a-version my current OS/2 build is! LOL

So I'm not giving up on that approach, just wanted to avoid any sort of conflicts, etc.

My MAINT partition is actually built using 'bootos2' utility, however there is nothing in the DOC that talks about how to target a CD build. This is the reason why I thought that maybe there is some way for me to literally grab my MAINT partition and "toss" that onto a CD. By "toss" I of course mean more than just the tools to use for burning a CD (already have that ready), rather I need to understand what's actually required for the CD to be bootable.

Anyways, alright, appreciate the pointer to the other Hobbes utils, will check those out! Thanks...

[Dave Yeo]

Don't you have access to a ArcaOS build? That would be simplest. USB and some CD boots require setting up a ramdisk and actually booting from that. Anyways there's various programs for booting a CD at https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?path=%2Fpub%2Fos2%2Futil%2Fstartup perhaps bootos22_9-26.zip

Yeah, I do Dave, but I honestly didn't want to mess around with that given how much older and version-of-a-version-of-a-version my current OS/2 build is! LOL

So I'm not giving up on that approach, just wanted to avoid any sort of conflicts, etc.

Just copy all your utilities to a USB stick, use the ArcaOS stick to boot to its maintenance desktop and mount and use your stick and its utilities.

[Neil Waldhauer]

I actually edit the ArcaOS DVD and put in my utilities. That way I can add DLL to a directory on the libpath.

One thing to watch out for is LVM. If you are on an old system without LVM, the BootAble program is a better way to make a bootable CD. Of course most systems without LVM also do not support booting from CD. I did have a utility diskette long ago for those systems. Create utility diskettes would make Diskette 3, and it was mostly empty, and was a great place to start.