USB Flash Drive as boot device

[Metz]

Hi

First post on here, and have tried to give this some thought (and done as much research as I can). I hope this is the right place, if not, I'll get it moved

I'm a relative newbie to the world of Linux in general, and Gentoo specifically...but I am ,without a doubt, a total convert. I've conviced myself that all my efforts will be worthwhile.

The question is this :-

If you have a board capable of booting from a USB Flash Drive device, is it feasible to put the bootloader (grub, lilo, ntldr...whatever) on the flash card, effectively rendering the machine dumb without it ??

I'm currently building a dual boot box which already has XP (this is a sin, right ? ) installed on hda, and gentoo going on hdb. The idea is that I put all boot info on the USB stick, meaning the machine simply cannot boot up without it.

Alternatively, putting a gentoo build so small it sqeaks on the flash drive, and have that mount the rest of the file systems.

Is any of this feasible, or just plain stoopid ?
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<<PAUSE>>

[thebigslide]

You need about 4GB for gentoo.
google for flash puppy linux
you download a version called CDpuppy and it has scripts for making a bootable USB drive.
the scripts are easily modifiable.
then you just change the boot order and apply a bios password
flash drives don't make a good root for 'from source' distros becasue of all the I/O. They burn out too easily. If you mean like a microdrive, tho, then give 'er.