What I wanted = A program to scan my collection of disk drives and say things along the lines of 'Whoa pal, this disk is so old Noah used it for his laptop on the ark!' What I got: An anime girl reading my disks and telling me the current price of petrol somewhere in the world. Look, I don't know what's going on here either! Surely it can't be that hard to do a little background check on my disks here can it?
Having got the disks plugged in, it's time to find out which work and which serve nothing more than paperweights now. To do that, I need to install an operating system. And to do that, I'm going to need a USB drive that holds more than 10 low resolution pictures of a cup of coffee..
Yes it's a promo USB with the company logo on it that we give away to clients to impress them, even though if they tried to use it to store something important on, they'd probably come to hate us for how small it in and how snail speed it crawls along at.
Where did this come from? (Where do it go? Where did it come from, Cotton Eye Joe?)
My memory is dusty. And I don't think I've seen this odd 'flick the blue switch like a lighter to pop the USB out' in the wild anywhere. But regardless of this, it has been my Win10 Iso loader USB longer than I can remember.
Okay yes the version on there currently is probably older than my kids and usually requires a couple of days of Windows Updates to bring it anywhere near what the latest version (before they gave up and moved to 11 completely) is. But it's installed plenty of times and works right out of the moving crate, so it'll do perfectly.
Interestingly using AtomOS through Rufus has coughed up a couple of warnings so far - firstly it sees it as the incorrect size (undoubtedly due to the things Atom has stripped away) and then there was something about a security issue? Interesting. I'm not sure if it's just being overly paranoid or there's something to it but let's try it and see what happens!
SO WHAT WENT WRONG THEN?
A LONG LONG TIME AGO NOW..
I remember my first USB drive stick. It cost me $30, it stored an absolute mind-blowing 256MB on it and it even had a little LED on the end that blinked furiously when it was hard at work. Speed of data transfer was set at 'a pretty wet week' and all it ever carried was a few pics and word documents.
But hey, that was OG usb drives baby!
But hey, that was OG usb drives baby!
Flash forward to now in 2026 and the 'giveaway' USB I found at work really isn't much better by today's standards.
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| I have labeled it accordingly. |
Yes it's a promo USB with the company logo on it that we give away to clients to impress them, even though if they tried to use it to store something important on, they'd probably come to hate us for how small it in and how snail speed it crawls along at.
And while it was fished out of a bucket of these things still wrapped in plastic and ready to annoy new clients with and therefore cost me nothing, it won't even fit the scaled down AtomOS I'm planning to install. So we're going to put that aside and use the old faithful instead.
WHERE EXACTLY DID THIS COME FROM?
Where did this come from? (Where do it go? Where did it come from, Cotton Eye Joe?)
My memory is dusty. And I don't think I've seen this odd 'flick the blue switch like a lighter to pop the USB out' in the wild anywhere. But regardless of this, it has been my Win10 Iso loader USB longer than I can remember.
Okay yes the version on there currently is probably older than my kids and usually requires a couple of days of Windows Updates to bring it anywhere near what the latest version (before they gave up and moved to 11 completely) is. But it's installed plenty of times and works right out of the moving crate, so it'll do perfectly.
PAGING DOCTOR RUFUS
To create this bootable drive, I'm using my old pal Rufus 'create bootable USB drives the easy way'. And it really does do what it says on the box too, you just load up your Windows disk image, insert a USB large enough to write to (so that work promo one is completely off the table here) and let Rufus do the trick. You don't even have to install Rufus, the .exe just does it's thing wherever you put it.
Interestingly using AtomOS through Rufus has coughed up a couple of warnings so far - firstly it sees it as the incorrect size (undoubtedly due to the things Atom has stripped away) and then there was something about a security issue? Interesting. I'm not sure if it's just being overly paranoid or there's something to it but let's try it and see what happens!
10 seconds later:
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| Ahh, that's what happens. Nothing productive. |
Just in case I ended up with a broken download, I downloaded a fresh copy and that ready to go, it was time for round 2!
And this time it worked!
And this time it worked!
SO WHAT WENT WRONG THEN?
Originally when getting the first copy of Atom OS the download getting timing out. And so I made it download the whole thing through download program JDownloader 2. Obviously Rufus didn't like this inherently broken version and flat out refused to turn it into anything useful.
So lesson learned, if you can't download it in full one day, come back another day!
Now we've got a bootable USB ready to install an OS onto one of our SSD's. The problem is now, I've just realized I don't have an ignition switch for all of this..
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