Library
Every guide on the site
12 articles covering firmware, storage layout, image formats, live Linux sessions and the practical work of preparing a drive.
What a multiboot USB drive is, and when one is worth setting up
One drive, several system images, and a menu at power-on. Here is what that arrangement actually does and where its limits sit.
UEFI and legacy BIOS: what the difference means for bootable media
Two firmware traditions, two routes from the power button to a running system. Knowing which one your machine is following explains most boot problems.
MBR and GPT: how a drive tells the computer what is on it
Before anything can be read from a drive, something has to describe how the drive is divided. Two schemes do that job, and they are not interchangeable.
Secure Boot, explained without the jargon
Firmware that checks a signature before running a loader. A short mechanism with a long tail of practical effects.
FAT32, exFAT, NTFS: choosing a file system for a portable drive
The file system decides which machines can read your drive and how large a single file may be. Two questions, one choice.
ISO, WIM, IMG and VHD: what each disk image format actually holds
Four extensions that all describe 'a disk in a file', built for four different purposes.
Persistence on a live Linux session, explained
A live session normally forgets everything at reboot. Persistence is the arrangement that lets it remember.
How to evaluate a Linux distribution before installing it
A live session is a test drive. Here is a checklist that turns twenty minutes of clicking around into a real evaluation.
Why one USB drive boots quickly and another crawls
Two drives with the same capacity and the same interface can differ by minutes on the same machine. The reasons are unglamorous and mostly invisible on the packaging.
Backing up properly before you rewrite any drive
Preparing bootable media is a destructive operation on whichever device you point it at. Ten minutes of preparation removes almost all of the risk.
Source, licence, release: how open-source software is actually shipped
Three artefacts sit behind every open-source tool. Knowing what each one is for tells you a great deal about what you are running.
A checklist for when a bootable drive will not start
Boot problems have a small number of causes and a natural order to check them in. Working down the stack beats guessing.