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With storage size increasing every year, smartphones are finally reaching levels that make them interesting for other applications as well. My Galaxy Note II ships with 16 Gigabyte of storage which can be expanded further with the use of memory cards.
DriveDroid is a free and paid application for Android devices that allows you to use your phone as a boot drive to boot your PC using ISO or IMG image files stored on the phone. This may make sense in a couple of ways. Maybe you want to have a repair or troubleshooting kit always with you, and since you carry your phone around with you at all times, it makes sense to use it for that purpose.
You can use it stationary as well, for instance if you do not have access to another flash memory stick, or if you need more storage than the one you have offers.
There are a couple of requisites though which I'd like to mention first before you get too excited. The application is compatible with all Android 2.2 and higher devices, and requires root to work. It also uses USB Mass Storage which means that some phones, like the Galaxy Note 2 or the Nexus 10 can't be used even if they are rooted. You also need an USB cable to connect the phone to the PC.
To use DriveDroid do the following:
While Linux seems to be the focus right now, you can also create a Windows installation disc using DriveDroid. The developer has published a tutorial on how to do so for Windows 7.
If you use USB Flash drives or optical discs to take disc images with you at all times, you may want to consider moving those to your phone instead to reduce the number of "things" you carry with you at all times. The program is well designed and should not pose any problems to users. The developer notes that some ISO images may not work correctly at the time of writing.
No information are available if and how the free and paid version of DriveDroid differ from each other.
Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
ok, this shit is awesome. setting up/troubleshooting a pc directly from my phone? yes, please!
This is really cool. My memory stick is only 1gb which i cannot use for booting backtrack which is like 3 gb. But this would really help me!
Was just about to buy a flash drive in order to install windows 7 from USB. Can this app do that?
The linked tutorial explains how this is done.
Oh wow, completely missed that. Thanks.
I’ve also done a tutorial on how to shrink your images after creating your own images. It requires a bit of Linux knowledge though: http://softwarebakery.com/shrinking-images-on-linux
Thanks for the great application, really useful. Can you comment on the free / paid version differences, if any?
Sounds like an awesome app I never heard about. Was thinking about buying it until I read above, “It also uses USB Mass Storage which means that some phones, like the Galaxy Note 2 or the Nexus 10 can’t be used even if they are rooted.” I own the Galaxy Note 2 :-|
You can still try the free version, but I’ve had many reports the note2 isn’t working, even with the different ums fixes I’ve build in.
The paid version doesn’t have ads and helps me earn some money. I try to put everything in the free version because I want people to try the full application.
Thanks for clarifying that, I could not find information about the difference.
I tried Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool with my phone’s sd card as usb stick.And It is ok to boot iso image from my phone.No need to use drivedroid.Can someone explain what is the difference?
I’ve tried writing a USB image directly to the sdcard of my phone as well. The problem back then was that every time USB was reconnected, I had to press the ‘Mount to PC’ button that pops up when you connect USB. The problem was that rebooting a PC all so triggered a USB disconnect and connect which would automatically unhost the sdcard. For me that is one problem that is solved with DriveDroid.
Another nice thing is that you can now place images as files on your sdcard. That allows you to have multiple install-disks that is easy to switch between, while still being able to use your sdcard like you’re used to.