On this fateful day, I wanted to dual-boot with Linux Ubuntu, my laptop has no CD-ROM and I couldn’t go through the hassle of looking for one at 2A.M in the morning; I also had no flash drive, just an external hard disk and my phone. Then it got me thinking, how on God’s green earth do I boot this thing?! And then it dawned on me that I could use my mobile device as a bootable USB. Before I go into any more details, lemme give you a little background.
Booting an operating system involves a few methods:
- Booting from a CD
- Booting from a bootable USB
Obviously, booting from a CD is a lot less stressful but as laptops and netbooks are taking over and becoming slimmer by the model, CD – Drives are getting phased out; which leaves just one more option: Booting from a USB drive. This is a little more complicated as it usually requires a third-party app to turn a normal USB device into a bootable one.
Note that the method I stumbled upon, was only possible because I was rocking a custom recovery at the time – which means my phone was rooted; if you have issues with this, please stop reading right now. I wouldn’t go into the pros and cons of rooting and running custom ROMs, recoveries and the likes, that would be for another time – if ever.
As I was saying, I realised that when you boot into your recovery, there is an option to mount USB storage. In this mode, your computer sees your phone and or SD card as a USB device without the hassle of installing drivers. Of course you’d have to use said third-party apps to flash the Operating System to the SD card.
NOTE: This method has only been tried with an external SD card and not the phone storage itself. So if you ever find yourself in the same position I was in and you happen to have a phone running a custom recovery, be sure you’re covered. If you would like detailed instructions, please let us know in the comment section below
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