Live USB

A live USB is a USB flash drive or a USB external hard disk drive which contains a full operating system that can be booted. Live USBs are closely related to live CDs, but can sometimes persistently save settings, and can permanently install software packages back onto the USB device. Like live CDs, live USBs can be used in embedded systems for

Many operating systems including Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows XP Embedded and many of the Linux and BSD distributions can be used from a USB flash drive. Windows 8 can run from a USB drive, with Windows To Go.

History

Since 1999, Apple Macintosh computers (beginning with the Power Mac G4 with AGP graphics and the slot-loading iMac G3 models) have been able to boot from USB. Intel-based Macs support booting Mac OS X from USB.

Specialized USB-based booting was proposed by IBM in 2004, in the papers "Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads" (PDF & Summary) and Boot GNU/Linux from a FireWire device.

SoulPad

SoulPad is a mobile computing project developed by researchers at IBM. The project's aim is to provide a computer user with the ability to suspend their operating system environment and resume it on another computer, all by using a USB data storage device. The SoulPad project is the subject of a paper entitled Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads, which won Best Paper at the 2005 ACM/USENIX MobiSys conference. A video demo of the technology in action was made available on IBM's website.

The researchers of the project have suggested that SoulPad could be used to boot one's operating environment from USB compatible storage devices such as cell phones and iPods (the latter being used in the video demo of the project).

The name SoulPad is derived from the project's aim to separate the underlying computer hardware (the "body" of the computer) from the user's operating environment (the "soul" of the computer). The "Pad" part is most likely a reference to IBM's former ThinkPad line of laptop computers.