Tech Trends

I’m very jealous of this little gadget. It’s a bootable jump drive offered by the makers of DSL. It only costs $60 bucks but I don’t have the cash to throw at it at the moment, so I’m going to try to make my own SanDisk Cruzer Micro 512MB Jump Drive into a bootable volume running DSL.

I initially tried to create one of these blindly by simply downloading DSL and dropping the resulting files (all 49MB) onto the jump drive. Silly in hindsight, I know, but I wasn’t really thinking it through until I’d clicked download. Then I realized that there was no way to boot from the jump drive. I’m Googling for more information today to find some real answers.

I found most of the resulting tutorials to be related to PC’s. I run a Mac network, all on OS X… I know, I know: Why would I need a bootable jump drive for my Macs? For fun, silly. Or actually, yesterday I had pulled the last save-worthy data from an old laptop drive of mine. I was booted from the old drive without an external housing for a laptop drive. I wanted to wipe the drive completely and wasn’t able to do it. However, if I had been able to boot up from my jump drive I could have wiped the disk drive clean and pitched it or stashed it mindlessly without any security woes. My inexperience may be causing gaps in my process logic, but I think I have it worked out in a way that makes sense. Feel free to guide or correct me.

At present, my main concern is whether or not my jump drive model has the hardware features required to be a bootable.