KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[TonyH Cow Catipult Cptn]

So I may have a P4 1.7Ghz cpu coming to me and I am thinking it could become a cool little folding machine considering I have a P4 mobo that I have replaced some bad capacitors on.....

Here's the idea.


I don't want to use a hard drive as it'll be noisey and consume more power. I want to attempt to boot from an O/S installed on a USB2 flash card of say 1Gb or 512Mb. I've done a quick search via google but didn't really find anything interesting. Hopefully, the O/S will slim and will allow the flash module to be plugged into other computers & boot from there without the fuss of installing drivers. Prob some kind of linux command prompt thing.....

I was thinking this would be a very cool experiment, anyone doing/herd of/seen anything similar?


Tony.

[jonnyv]

I've heard of people doing this with much more modest boxes (like Soekris) for firewalling purposes, but those usually have a CF slot already attached to the ata port. I imagine you should be able to find a CF-ATA adapter to be able to do what you desire.
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[jbyram2]

There is a link to how to fold from a pen drive at the bottom of this page.

Rumor is that running too long that way wears out the pen drive. Don't know myself.

Get an el-cheapo CDROM drive and run Overclockix instead
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Something Completely different

[jonnyv]

[ToeBee]

Well if you don't want to use a hard drive that is your call but the reasons you give aren't a very convincing argument Hard drives usually take between 5 and 10 watts of power (that P4 will be sucking 100+) and the noise that the hard drive will produce won't even be audible over the CPU fan needed to keep the P4 cool.

I am running my old P3 without a HDD. Cheap CD-ROM drive and a knoppix CD got me up and running in 10 minutes instead of using a CF or USB drive I mount an SMB share over the network and run BOINC (the only true DC project!) off of the network mount. Works like a charm.

[Tim]

www.damnsmalllinux.org

My friend ran this somehow booting to a USB thumb drive. It only requires about 50MB and includes a very nice desktop.

[Morbus]

Downloading it now, this looks like some really neat toys, I'm considering buying one of the driveless ones just for the novelty factor (I figure if I'll buy a 600$ graphics card, a 200$ computer is easily justifiable) This stuff is pretty exciting, just wish I knew more about linux, to see something this neat and not know how to make it work is frustrating

[Grizzly]

Yes , Grizz has twice set up USB sticks as a bootable hard device .

First you must be able to set the BIOS to boot from either a)USB HDD on new boards or b) legacy USB device on older boards .
Second . use fdisk or similar to set an active partition on the memory stick and then of course format it (Win 98 setup floppy has all you needto do this)
I have not used any Linux O/S for these sticks , just Win 98 which fits well onto a 1 Gig stick .
The final bootable stick in my case is NOT very fast (Pendrive 2.0) and IS noticably slower than a HDD .
Swaping the stick from machine to machine is not a problem , just any MoBo drivers ect need to be loaded onto the stick for each and every different board .
You may not get the full size of the memory stick (but at least 95%) due to format issues .

Dead handy these things are !! (Especially if you whish to keep your surfing secret

Regds Grizz
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