Flash Drive Booting Fundamentals - Taking a Break
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All right, we have arrived to the end of this part. By now you should be familiar with the basics of bootable flash drives and have amassed the foundations on which the upcoming articles will rely. But at this time you can already create a bootable flash drive for yourself, and you also know how to boot up a system with it. That was the very purpose of this article; for some people, it's enough.
As we've promised earlier, the very next article will cover BIOS flashing techniques, mainly just a variation of what we already know. Booting into DOS and launching the appropriate (or universal) flashing utility is what we want. Right after that, we will see the possibilities of "on-the-fly" live operating systems. It's such a treat to boot into your favorite Linux distro or Windows XP/Vista to play around and experiment from a stick.
Troubleshooting hardware problems and disinfecting computers via bootable flash drives is a strategy used by lots of professionals every now and then. The advantages outweigh the drawbacks (i.e. the virus can infect the data on the thumb drive itself). We must agree that hooking up a flash drive with the necessary tools is much easier (and faster!) than burning rewritable CD/DVD medias just for troubleshooting.
Summing these up, you can do a countless number of things with flash drives. Once this series is over you are going to become very "attached" to your thumb-drive(s) and carry them around on your key-chain or in your pockets. Now that we're talking about this, it's strongly advised that you also check out the following article: Setting up Your USB Storage Device as a Portable Application Library.
And finally, we can't really finish without inviting you to join our helpful community at DevHardware Forums. We've a strong base of resident professionals, enthusiasts, and tech experts. If you want to hear opinions on some service or ask for some clarifications regarding some details, just shoot us your questions.
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