Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.
Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
Did your bootloader ever fail you? Now how do you debug that?
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.