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Boot an O/S from a USB2 512Mb-1Gb Flash Card???

 
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TonyH Cow Catipult Cptn
Baron
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Joined: 03 Sep 2003
Posts: 133

PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 12:53 am    Post subject: Boot an O/S from a USB2 512Mb-1Gb Flash Card??? Reply with quote

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.
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jonnyv
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Joined: 15 May 2002
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 1:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 7:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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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jonnyv
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 11:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

jbyram2 wrote:
Rumor is that running too long that way wears out the pen drive. Don't know myself.


Flash memory is only rated for something like 1million write cycles, so you could wear it out if you just installed normally. However, most of the firewall type installations are set up to write their logs to a ram disk which then gets writen to the flash like once a day. You could do something similar with a pen drive. You could probably even still use that Overclockix.
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ToeBee
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Joined: 30 Jun 2004
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 8:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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 Smile 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 Smile 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.
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Tim
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Joined: 12 Jul 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 3:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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.
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Morbus
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Joined: 16 Jul 2005
Posts: 32
Location: Longview, WA

PostPosted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 12:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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
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Grizzly
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Joined: 01 Jun 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 26, 2005 5:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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 Wink

Regds Grizz
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