Friday, September 11, 2009

Make iPhone a bootable USB Disk - Tutorial

One of our friends, limneos has published an excellent article about using an iPhone in quite unexpected way - to make it bootable device for the PC. 

That is, you can boot a PC  using your little shiny iPhone or iPod, it seems it should work for Mac too, but you will need to google for bootefi too. 

http://limneoswizard.blogspot.com/2009/09/make-iphone-bootable-usb-disk-boot-your.html


If you already have disk image you can save some time.  Make sure it has .img extension and copy it to the USB Drive volumes folder.

$ scp windows7.bin root@iphone:/var/Volumes/windows7.img
now you need to update LunConfig.plist file in the same directory to let USB Drive know about new volume:

$ scp root@iphone:/var/Volumes/LunConfig.plist . # copy file to the desktop
use your favorite text editor to edit this XML file and insert the following lines:
       <dict>
        <key>ReadOnly</key>
        <false/>
        <key>SectorCount</key>
        <integer>488871</integer>
        <key>Type</key>
        <integer>1</integer>
        <key>VolumeName</key>
        <string>windows7</string>
    </dict>
USB Drive ignores SectorCount for existing volumes and calculates number of sectors from a file size.  Next copy file back to the device:
$ scp LunConfig.plist root@iphone:/var/Volumes/
and plug USB cable to the iPhone.  USB Drive re-reads config and will mount your drive as a new disk.

11 comments:

hdmi said...

The Cydia Repository it's broken, pls fix it

dmp said...

fixed, thank you.

Brandon said...

What should we use to create these bin files? OSX Disk Utility? Some kind of bin/cue mastering thing? What are they supposed to be?

Anonymous said...

Waaaaayyyyy easier:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

2 Clicks, done! iPhone boots Linux, DOS, whatever! ;-)

Anonymous said...

Hi, thanks for this very good tool you have give us.
Just one question, why is the transfers rate soo slowly ??
It is something that will be fixed in next realise ??
Thanks for your reply.
Good continuation

Torpie13 said...

Hi Dmytro,
can you just tell me wich format are the img files ( IE can I rename ISO files to img file, of can I convert this files via qemu-img to img files)
Thanx alot for help.
BTW, the final version of the product will be free or payable via cydia ?


cheers

Torpie13 said...

UP ^^

Anonymous said...

is there anyway to do this in windows XP?

Anonymous said...

(Usb Drive) Yeah My Ipod Isn't Recognized But Itunes

Anonymous said...

hey Dmytro ... are you working to fix the transfer speed ? it is very very slow ... i tried using it from mac copying files takes hours ... so i cancelled

kabir khan said...

I tried but it was too slow and i have got a poor experience from bootable iphone. Can i get some better speed?
I found some great technology post here pccenter