Carrying portable operating system on a USB drive can come very handy when your computer refuses to boot from the regular hard drive operating system. There are a number of portable operating systems available, many of them Linux flavours.

How to install portable operating system?

Though the process will vary with the operating system that you are installing on USB, broadly it will require:

1. Changing boot-device order in BIOS.
We need to place USB drive above the hard drive to enable the computer to boot using the operating system on USB, if there is any. The first device should be the disc drive, then the USB drive and then hard drive. One can access BIOS settings by pressing the relevant key after following the instructions that appear on screen as soon a computer is switched on.

2. Downloading the portable version of the operating system.

3. Installing the operating system on USB.

After the installation is complete, one can boot into the portable operating system by connecting the USB to the port and turning on the system.

Installing Slax on a USB

Slax is one of my favourite portable operating system due to its ease of installation on USB drives. It comes equipped with necessary applications to handle word processing, creating presentations and playing multimedia. It can play almost all type of files with its default player KPlayer, Juk and MPlayer. Its installation involves a few simple steps.

1. Download the version of Slax for USB dives.

2. Format the USB drive to FAT32 file system. Even if your USB is using the same file system.

3. Unzip the Slax USB archive in the root of the USB drive. The drive will now have two folders, one called "boot" and the other called "slax".

4. Navigate to the "boot" directory and run bootinst.sh script (if you are in Linux) or bootinst.bat script (if you are in Windows).

5. Set BIOS so that it tries to boot from USB before looking into the hard disk.

6. Restart your computer to boot into Slax.

In Slax, you can configure LAN settings through KDE Start-> Internet -> Set IP Address option. For configuring modem, Internet Dialup Tool should be used.

Portable Slax retains all your settings and saved files just as a normal operating system. You will be able to find all your saving intact when you boot into Slax the next time. And it work pretty fast on USB drives as well, giving user no chance to crib for speed.

The USB with portable Slax installed can be used to store data as ususal. Just don't tamper with the two Slax folders. Effectively, Slax will use just a few hundred mega bytes on your USB.