I dont have a DVD writer. Can I use a HDD?

uoc · 3 Feb 2007 at 13:59

Hey,

Dont have a DVD writer and CDs are too small but its an image and I want to give it to a friend to boot from. Can I 'burn' the image to a small hard drive? Ive got loads of 7GB Hdds lol.

Is it possible to boot from it?

Cheers!

wesley · 3 Feb 2007 at 15:01

image of what? your OS? if so, your friend's PC hardware mite be different from yours so it mite not even boot up. only way to find out.

yes you can make image to hard drive, depending which image/backup software you use

uoc · 3 Feb 2007 at 15:29

wesley said:
image of what? your OS? if so, your friend's PC hardware mite be different from yours so it mite not even boot up. only way to find out.

yes you can make image to hard drive, depending which image/backup software you use

Its not of an OS. Its just a piece of software we want to boot from.

What software can I do to make the harddrive bootable?

skanky · 3 Feb 2007 at 17:57

uoc said:
Its not of an OS. Its just a piece of software we want to boot from.

What software can I do to make the harddrive bootable?

what needs to be on dvd and also needs to be bootable? yer being awfully cryptic about whatever it is..

bledd · 3 Feb 2007 at 18:41

probably a linux distro or something

usb booting can be a pain and unreliable.. i reckon you bite the bullet and get a dvdrw, they're about £20 now for basically top of the range

Dureth · 3 Feb 2007 at 23:07

I've seen older model DVD-RW drives for under £10 now. Ok it was only a 4x drive but it WAS under £10!

As others have said a top of the range DVD-RW drive is only £20 now so bite the bullet and get one.

fumbles · 3 Feb 2007 at 23:13

If you computer supports it, you can boot from a number of mediums. USB, PXE (Ethernet), etc. There is also that whole VM thing too