usb flash drive

The sickening click-crunch-whir of a dying hard drive. The ever-spinning-never-seeking DVD. The undetectable USB flash drive.

The three telltale signs that a significant portion of your life is about to disappear into the digital ether.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all wished that we’d made a second backup, or kept our optical discs out of the sun — but we haven’t, and the data is lost.

So it goes.

KP Weblog: "his is my recipe for installing Linux on a USB flash drive. It creates two partitions on your flash drive: one with a full Linux system and a separate FAT32 partition for sharing files with other systems."

V3: "Linux developer Mandriva has updated its operating-system-on-a-stick with the release of Mandriva Flash 2010, which includes a bootable version of the software on a USB Flash drive."

Microsoft's Hyper-V lives comfortably on a USB Flash Drive.