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[–] 9 points 5 months ago (11 children)

I mean I'm not sure I could actually boot off of my phone as a USB drive. That would be an interesting concept.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

    Unlikely. The USB protocol requires one master and one or more slaves (or whatever less charged nomenclature you prefer). In all likelihood UEFI will blindly assume to be the master while Android and iOS require negotiation to figure out who's boss and what interface to present.
    Although given UEFI it might be possible to patch that functionality in.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    i had this feature when i installed ubports (ubuntu touch) on my phone in 2021.

    much before that in 2013 my phone's stock rom had a 'driver install' mode that presents an iso file in the system partition to the computer as a virtual cdrom, i could swap out that file with a linux iso and it would boot

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    The USB protocol and UEFI aren't a problem, but Android/iOS might be. I've booted various PCs from a raspberry pi (USB-OTG), but the last time I tried to boot an iso from my android phone I couldn't get it to work. It's been a while so I can't remember exactly what the issue was.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    My guess the issue is that phones don't just show up as simple drives, they rely on MTP support

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

    It does, though with an app that exposes the iso.

    Edit: Right, i thought it was EtchDroid. I think it was DriveDroid (with a broken cert)? There's also SimpleBoot now.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    There's a tool, whose name I forget, which is included in Kali NetHunter to do just that. It does whatever trickery is needed to present the phone/tablet as a bootable thumb drive. It requires root and, to my dismay when I needed it, I never owned a device that was rootable to fully use NetHunter. It could do a lot of other cool stuff via USB too; phone as a Bad USB, Rubber Ducky, automated Windows login bypasses, etc.

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