[idea] Tired of juggling thumbdrives for your live distros?

I got tired of screwing around with my 2 or 3 reliable pendrives for live USB distros. I have several favourites I use in a couple systems and I always keep overwriting my spare drives to try a newer version of one or another. Today I had an idea:

As a kid I used floppy disks, 3" 1/2 pieces of plastic with a paper sticker. I used to write on them with pencil so I could erase the label when I changed the content, but my favourite programs and stuff had nicer looking labels and were written with ink and I broke the square thingy so it would be forever read-only.

So, I did the modern equivalent to that:

Reuse those old 512mb-4gb SD cards that just won't cut it anymore with a heftier camera like my T3i. So I grabbed a 8920 avery sheet, placed the rulers accordingly and came up with these. I'll be redoing them once my printer stops munching my paper and I can get a proper one, but I thought i could share the idea here

Almost all images are from random google searces but the neat arch, suse and crunchbang ones are from Deviantart user amai-boscuit

I might do them from scratch with the measures of the SD stickers

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Cool idea! I'll just point out that there is a site called www.unixstickers.com that sells stickers for your case or other peripherals.

You could also use something like Bootice to create multiple partitions on a single flash drive, and install each distro to a different partition. There's also a way to use grub as a boot manager and have multiple distros on a single flashdrive without needing to partition it iirc. Google around, I'm sure you can find out how.

Just a suggestion though. SD cards work just fine : )

Sorry for necroing, I've been away from the forums for a while, thanks for the suggestion, I'd look at that BootICE

I just found neat reusing those old SD cards that hold around 500-2000mb which don't cut it anymore for my cameras. I am shooting raw on a canon DSLR and that sucker eats up gigabytes on each shooting session. So I've been using 8-16-32 gb cards, and class10 for rapid storage. so these were deprecated and gathering dust on a shelf. now they have a new purpose :P

That's pretty cool.

This is what I use: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softwarebakery.drivedroid&hl=en

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Okay, this is pretty cool. What are you experiences with it?

It's great, I haven't had any trouble with it and it's really simple to use. You just load the ISOs on your phone then select which one you want to mount and plug it in. You can mount things as read-only or writeable, or as phoney CD-ROM for systems which don't support booting from USB (I haven't tried that).

Okay, hmm I should root my phone (or my next one, changing soon). But it's nice to know that that is a possibility.

Whoa that's pretty nifty!

I'm getting an Asus ZenFone 2 in about a month, I'm surely going to use that!
Meanwhile I'll try that with my tablet.

BTW do you know if you can have persistence files on the phone?

Thanks for the share!

I love you.

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Nice. I got tired of having to put SD cards in a reader, so I got me the cheap 8GB Kingston sticks and did almost the same

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well that's a lot fancier than mine! what are those usb casings made of? aluminium?

If you are feeling particularly crafty, you can carve out those labels, and with salty water-soaked qtip and a 9v battery make a pretty nifty engraving on those

Hey, whatever works best for you : )

I haven't tried but it has a writeable mode so I assume you can mount a live image with storage and not just read only live cd isos

I think so, it's either very thin and anodized aluminium or it's magnesium.
Not too sure about etching the labels in there, there already is text etched in the one side (you can see it just below the label on the top left stick) and the Kingston name is engraved in the other side.
Perhaps someone might be able to 3D-print a cover with logo for them. It would make them slightly bulkier though.

The sticks are Kingston Data Traveler SE9 (the regular SE9, not the SE9 G2 with its flattened head), 8GB in size. You can find them for about 5 EUR or $5. Not the fastest, but fast enough for USB 2.0 and certainly very compact and elegant.
I bought one first to verify that it would boot on any PC (I know a few laptops that flat-out refuse to boot from certain sticks), then bought 10 more once I knew they worked.
The labels were printed on regular paper, cut to 11x11mm and attached with regular transparent tape

I find it funny that just the other day, I was looking at a very reasonably priced 128gb usb, that I'd like to use for persistence kali,Ubuntu,Mint and arch. That's 32gb per os. Or I can just do Kali,HBCD, Arch. making it about 42gb per os. anyway its cool to see that we've all moved away from having to reuse that same thumbdrive over and over again. Plus If I buy two of them I can throw other distros and it wont be a big deal deleting them for the new version if I can just terminal apt-get magic the new version.