OS on a USB flash drive, or SDHC card?

With the rapidly decreasing price of SDHC cards and USB Flash drives,
I have become interested in trying to set up a PC that boots only from
one of these drives, just to experiment with.

I started wondering about the possibility of something like this when
I bought an Asus M3AH-HDMI motherboard, which has something called "Asus
Express Gate Light" on it. It is essentially a version of Linux which
is on a ROM chip, and boots up in 5 seconds. It allows you to connect
to the Internet, chat, view web pages, do email, and Internet Phone, all
without a hard drive.

I also played around with the Ubuntu boot CD, and was amazed at how
full featured it seemed, even though I had only booted from the CD - not
installed anything.

If those sorts of things are possible, then why not installing
something similar to a USB flash drive, and booting from it?

I've been told by several people online that it is not possible, or
that something like this would only last a month or so before the USB
flash drive would reach its overwrite limit.

Anyone have thoughts on this? Has anyone tried it?


Thanks!

Previously OhioGuy wrote:
With the rapidly decreasing price of SDHC cards and USB Flash drives,
I have become interested in trying to set up a PC that boots only from
one of these drives, just to experiment with.

I started wondering about the possibility of something like this when
I bought an Asus M3AH-HDMI motherboard, which has something called "Asus
Express Gate Light" on it. It is essentially a version of Linux which
is on a ROM chip, and boots up in 5 seconds. It allows you to connect
to the Internet, chat, view web pages, do email, and Internet Phone, all
without a hard drive.

I also played around with the Ubuntu boot CD, and was amazed at how
full featured it seemed, even though I had only booted from the CD - not
installed anything.

You can also try the Knoppix DVD. Has even more stuff. The power
of free software, were they can put what is sensible on the thing
without worrying about IP rights.

If those sorts of things are possible, then why not installing
something similar to a USB flash drive, and booting from it?

The Knoppix/Ubundu life-CD/DVD can be put on USB-stick. I have
done this for a Knoppix CD and it is remarkable how snappy it
reacts. It does take longer to boot than the ASUS thing, as it
has to detect hardware though.

I've been told by several people online that it is not possible, or
that something like this would only last a month or so before the USB
flash drive would reach its overwrite limit.

Not true anymore. Runnign without swap (as the life-CDs/DVDs do)
the load on the drive is relatively low. Also FLASH has gotten
more resilient with overwrites up to 100'000-1'000'000 (from 10'000)
and advanced wear-leveling algorithms, ECC and realocation strategies.

SSDs (essentially SATA-flash drives) give lifetimes like
5 years with two times the disk size written per day (in
an arbitrary place, can be a high number of overwrites
of the same area).

Also some peopla have tried to kill newer USB FLASH
by overwriting, without success. With eth older 10'000
overwrite devices that did not have wear-leveling and
other measures, you could typically kill an area with
20'000-50'000 overwrites, i.e. in a really short time.

Anyone have thoughts on this? Has anyone tried it?

Best google for Linux on USB/Linux on Flash. One place to
start is http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

Arno

OhioGuy wrote:

With the rapidly decreasing price of SDHC cards and USB Flash
drives, I have become interested in trying to set up a PC that boots only from one of these drives, just to experiment
with.

I started wondering about the possibility of something like thiswhen I bought an Asus M3AH-HDMI motherboard, which has
something
called "Asus Express Gate Light" on it. It is essentially a version
of Linux which is on a ROM chip, and boots up in 5 seconds. It
allows you to connect to the Internet, chat, view web pages, do
email, and Internet Phone, all without a hard drive.

I also played around with the Ubuntu boot CD, and was amazed at how
full featured it seemed, even though I had only booted from the CD -
not installed anything.

If those sorts of things are possible, then why not installing
something similar to a USB flash drive, and booting from it?

No reason at all, in fact the Asus eee pc does just that.

I've been told by several people online that it is not possible,

Its not that easy to do with XP or Vista, but still possible. Easy with Linux.

or that something like this would only last a month or so before the USB flash drive would reach its overwrite limit.

That doesnt turn out to be true with the Asus eee pc even with XP as the OS.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

I gave up on those, they just make my head hurt and if I get too
carried away, brown smelly stuff starts dripping from my ears.

Has anyone tried it?

Hordes have. You can just buy it already done too like with the Asus eee pc.

OhioGuy kenjka:
If those sorts of things are possible, then why not installing
something similar to a USB flash drive, and booting from it?

I have installed WinXP on USB flash drive... You have to do some
modifications on the XP boot CD from which you'll install WinXP onto a flash
drive, but that's all described on the net... Just google for it...

I've been told by several people online that it is not possible, or
that something like this would only last a month or so before the USB
flash drive would reach its overwrite limit.

It is, but with some small modifications...

There is also EWF (Enhanced Write Filter) made for XP Embedded, but can be
used with some tweaking on normal XP installation on USB stick... It enables
you to use 3 modes of operation... It's used to save the flash drive from
wearing when a lot of erase/write operations are made...

Here's the link...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms912906.aspx

Anyone have thoughts on this? Has anyone tried it?

Yup, I have one installation at home since I was building a prototype for
something I needed, and it's booting from 2GB USB Flash drive...

There are quite a few things you need to consider when doing this...

In BIOS, you need to enable booting from USB and you need to set the USB
flash drives to be seen as hard drives... Boot priority is set to the USB
flash drive...

Also, it is recommended to disable a swap file and hibernation when using
USB flash drive installed XP...

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By runf

Damir Lukic,
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