Carolyn Nicita

Make Your Own Parasite…er, I mean, Run Your Computer from a USB Thumb Drive

Also known as Fedora on a Stick

Depending on why your computer crashed, you may be able to get to your data by booting from a thumb drive.   Yes, that’s right–stick a thumb drive in, turn the computer on, and even if your operating system is corrupted, you may still see it when it boots up.   Even if you had been running Windows, you may still be saved.  You may even be able to connect to the Internet, and run the word processor already loaded onto the parasite…er, thumb drive.

It’s worth trying, right?

Here’s what you do:

Go here and download the free program Fedora Live USB Creator.  Install it on your computer– hopefully it hasn’t crashed yet–and follow the directions.

If you allocate persistent storage, you can save your own data to the thumb drive, so after you turn off the host computer, your data will still be on the parasite…er, the thumb drive, that you take away with you.

You may have to go into the CMOS and tell the host computer to try to boot first from the USB before it tries the CD or hard drive, so this technique is a bit advanced.  It’s well worth learning, though, especially since your friends will then interrupt you and not me when their computers crash.