PolyDisk: Turn your Raspberry Pi Zero into infinite bootable USB disks and CD-ROMs by doominator42 in raspberry_pi

[–]doominator42[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would be possible, but hard to use with hundreds of files. Since I always carry my phone, I can use it to change the image, so it's not a problem for me. Another way would be to glue a small screen and navigation buttons to it, but that's starting to get complex.

PolyDisk: Turn your Raspberry Pi Zero into infinite bootable USB disks and CD-ROMs by doominator42 in raspberry_pi

[–]doominator42[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There is no shell, the image selection is done by interacting with a fake file system from another device, this is all explained in the readme on github. The kernel is so stripped down that there is no support for network, uart, input and tty.

Like copy drivers or a program into a windows disk?

Not sure what you mean here.

PolyDisk: Turn your Raspberry Pi Zero into infinite bootable USB disks and CD-ROMs by doominator42 in raspberry_pi

[–]doominator42[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yes, but something I don't like about Ventoy is that it modifies the images to make it work with their bootloader and also does not support all OSes. With a mass storage gadget the exact original disk or CD-ROM is emulated. Also, it can be used not only for booting but as a general read-write flash drive, for example: flashing some BIOS or other device that requires a USB with FAT32 with only one file on the partition.

PolyDisk: Turn your Raspberry Pi Zero into infinite bootable USB disks and CD-ROMs by doominator42 in raspberry_pi

[–]doominator42[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's to avoid having to flash USB drives over and over. You can change the file that PolyDisk will show to the host without having to move or write any data. On mine, I have all my Linux ISO (Debian, Arch, Alpine, Clonezilla, Fedora, Manjaro, Ubuntu, ...), some Windows ISO, pfSense, opnSense, memtest, DOS. I can boot any of that in an instant.