[HTC Pico (Explorer)] keval_104:
DriveDroid allows you to boot your PC from ISO/IMG files stored on your phone. This is ideal for trying Linux distributions or always having a rescue-system on the go... without the need to burn different CDs or USB pendrives. The paid version of DriveDroid does not include ads and helps the developer.

DriveDroid also includes a convenient download menu where you can download USB-images of a number of operating systems from your phone.

You can also create USB-images which allows you to have a blank USB-drive where you can store files in. Another possibility is to use tools on your PC to make a bootable USB-drive out of the blank image that DriveDroid created.

How do you make this work?

* Connect your phone to your PC using an USB cable

* Download an image file (.iso or .img) or create one

* Select the image file in DriveDroid to let your phone 'host' the file over USB

* (Re)start your PC and make sure the correct boot priority is set in the bios

* The image should now be booted on your PC

Recommendations:

To quickly try DriveDroid download SliTaz from the download menu. It is an operating system of only 35MB, so it should be easily downloaded.

You can also create a 100MB FAT image through the 'Create blank image...'-menu. It should show up as a normal empty USB-drive on your PC.

Requirements:

* Root

* USB cable (from phone to PC)

* USB Mass Storage (UMS) should be enabled on your ROM (being able to mount SD card)

Some devices have trouble with UMS and ADB. Please set the USB-mode to 'Mass Storage' though DriveDroids preferences. If that does not work, send me a support email, also through the preferences.

USB Mass Storage (UMS)

DriveDroid relies on the kernel of Android, in particular the USB Mass Storage (UMS) feature. It allows your phone to act as an USB-drive and have a device (SDcard) or file (ISO/IMG) be used as the content for that emulated drive.

Different Android devices implement this feature differently. Most modern devices do not have UMS enabled by default, but it is supported by the kernel. I've added a option to DriveDroid to change the USB-mode for devices that do not support UMS by default, but no guarantees. I'm getting very mixed reports of devices working and not.

I need all the help I can get to fix this problem. Hopefully we can figure out some method to enable UMS in a stable way.

Hybrid-ISOs

Since most phones only support emulating USB-drives, DriveDroid will not act as an CD-drive. This means that not all ISO files will work, only hybrid-ISOs and IMG files. Hybrid-ISOs are specially crafted ISOs that is used on many modern Linux-distributions. DriveDroids downloadlist contains most of the distributions I've found that do have hybrid-ISOs.

This is just to notify you that you have to convert non-hybrid ISOs by writing the ISO to the emulated USB-drive. You can get a blank emulated USB-drive by creating a blank image through DriveDroids + menu.

True CD-ROM emulation

True CD-rom emulation is possible. It should allow you to run any ISO on your PC. With some help of others I've found a way to get CD-rom support, but it requires patching the kernel. For most users this isn't an option, however if you're interested: I've applied patches to the kernel of CyanogenMods Nightly builds for the Samsung Galaxy S (my device). The patches are accepted, so the more recent nightlies should work. I think the patches can be merged easily to other kernels (for other devices) as well, but I need people to try this for themselves. We can see whether we can get the patches into the nightly builds of CyanogenMod of more devices when it's well-tested.

DrivrDroid Free

Drivedroid Paid