Extra Uses
32MB is absolutely plenty for a portable, bootable device that contains a mass of utilities designed for system setup, administration and other tasks.Once I'd made it bootable, I then copied over some absolutely crucial utilities that everyone should have, like Ghost, Bootpart, the CuteMouse driver, and Savepart, for partition manipulation and backup and simple mouse functions.
Installing XOSL, the Extended Operating System Loader, is then a piece of cake, allowing you to boot any OS installed on any partition on any connected disk on your system. XOSL also supplies Mikhail Ranish's partition manager that mimics a lot of Partition Magic functionality for zero cost.
With over 28MB left after that little lot, there's still plenty of room for St. Petersburg Linux, a tiny Linux distribution in ~12MB that supplies a web browser (Mozilla), network stack and other utilities for a complete modern OS in under 15MB of disk space.
That leaves over half the Bar storage for device drivers for the disk controllers I'm likely to install OSs onto, plus some other small utilities like an FDISK replacement and a DELTREE clone.
Bingo, a £15 bootable PC Swiss Army knife that lets me fix and prep all the systems I need access to in my HEXUS work. Just to be cute, I even got the Windows XP recovery console on there (bootable of course, using XOSL and Ranish's part tool) and I have a couple of MB free for a small Knoppix data store. A 64MB key starts to make sense at this point but it's still amazing what you can cram in there on the 32MB version if you're determined.
USB-PenDrive.co.uk should start bundling Knoppix with Bars. Proper geek tool heaven.
I now have 400 frisbees and I don't know why I didn't get a Bar sooner.
