Don't throw of your old Thumdrive

A few years back having your own Thumbdrive was quite an unimaginable thing. I still remember when I first bought my first 128 MB Thumbdrive for as much as Rs.3300. 128 MB... aaahhh, thats too old fashioned, nowadays you get a 1 GB Thumbdrive for as low as Rs. 500. You might also think of disposing of your old 12b MB Thumbdrive coz thats too small of a space to store your bulk MP3's, DiVX's etc. Then what to do with that small little thing ?

Don't worry, your old Thumbdrive can turn out to be an excellent recovery media when your PC doesn't boot from your Hard Drive due to Media failure, OS crash or say Virus attack. Here are a few simple steps which would help you to make your Thumbdrive bootable with a compact Linux distro running on it.

Here it goes -

1. Format your Thumdrive in Windows with Fat32 filesystem.
2. Download syslinux-3.36.zip or any latest version of syslinux file.
3. Download dsl-4.3-embedded.zip or any other latest version of dsl-embedded file.
4. Extract the contents of dsl-4.3-embedded.zip to the root folder of the Thumbdrive.
5. Extract syslinux-3.36.zip in a temporary folder & browse to the folder win32. Now from the command prompt execute system -ma (where X: is the Drive Letter for Thumdrive in Windows) from the win32 folder.
6. The Thumdrive is now Bootable by changing the Boot sequence from your BIOS to USB.
7. Linux installed on the Thumdrive can also be booted within Windows using the QEMU emulator found on the root of the Thumdrive.

Isn't this quite easy. Try it yourself. More of Thumdrive based installations can be found at http://www.pendrivelinux.com .

Thats what you call "Best out of Waste".