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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

Ventoy is great, but what I really miss is DriveDroid from the good old days. It still exists, but it's not quite as reliable on modern Android as it was on rooted Cyanogenmod back in the day and the distro download links have rotten away.

For those not familiar with it, it turns your Android phone into a USB DVD drive, meaning not only can you just download and host any distro with a few taps, you also don't need any hybrid ISOs or anything like that, the computer sees a real DVD so even old or weird machines accept it.

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I wrote https://github.com/chenxiaolong/MSD for exactly that. It's a small wrapper around the Linux kernel's mass storage emulation support (CONFIG_USB_CONFIGFS_MASS_STORAGE). It can emulate a read-only optical drive, a readable disk, or a writable disk.

It is compatible with both older devices that configure USB via init scripts and newer devices that use Android's USB gadget HAL, but it does require Android 11+.

Looks cool, bookmarking for when I finally have a rooted phone again

I've been using an IODD 2531 enclosure for many years now, and it's doing pretty much exactly that. It works with any ISO I throw at it and has no issues with Secure Boot. It’s also platform-agnostic as it acts as a USB optical disk drive.

There are some shortcomings, like a bug where it doesn't remember the last selected ISO if its filename is too long, files also need to be fully sequential. These might be fixed in their newer models (the 2531 is fairly old).

There's also USB Mountr (aka PhoneStick)[1], but of course YMMV with modern Android. Might be better to use a rooted Android with the DriveDroid + the Magisk compatibility module[2].

[1] https://github.com/JinbaIttai/phonestick

[2] https://github.com/overzero-git/DriveDroid-fix-Magisk-module

As far as I can tell, a great many Android phones have always been able for their SD cards to serve as read/write external storage/bootable drives for PC's when connected by USB cable.

You have to format the SD card in a PC first, perhaps also repartition beforehand.

Even the old Sony smartphones before there were iPhones could do it with their MemorySticks. I really do miss the non-Android non-iOS smartphones.

Such a shame Google & Apple refuse to let us use our devices to their full potential.

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