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Installing an operating system ONTO a flash drive

Q

quizzelsnatch

Senior member
Operating system being Windows XP Home SP2. I was wondering about installing a complete version of windows xp onto a flash drive. I'm almost certain it's possible. However, i was wondering is it practicle? Is there a speed difference? Link to benchmarks?
 
Compact flash is slow, and is limited in writes (to something like 10m, but still 😉). I've considered doing it for minimal systems, with minimal need to write to the hard drive, but never with Windows.
 
I've made pen drives bootable of course using Win98, but that was just for convenience to access other devices or for using Ghost.

I know there are some flavors of Linux that could be run on a USB drive, but again, slow would be a problem. Then again, there's CD-based versions of Linux too.
 
Originally posted by: networkman
I've made pen drives bootable of course using Win98, but that was just for convenience to access other devices or for using Ghost.

I know there are some flavors of Linux that could be run on a USB drive, but again, slow would be a problem. Then again, there's CD-based versions of Linux too.
Click to expand...

But you see all of that stuff, is either for experimentation (like trying a new distro) or emergencies and crashes.

I have considered using a CF ATA adapter for a very small integrated car PC project, but that's about it really, never finished the project the costs would be insane with touch screens and what not, and I would end up crashing with all those goodies around me 😉
 
I modified linux to run off a CF card once - had to make it use no swap file and store all config files and logs etc on a RAMdisk until specifically committed to flash memory. I don't know if any of this would be possible for windows.
 
Originally posted by: Atheus
I modified linux to run off a CF card once - had to make it use no swap file and store all config files and logs etc on a RAMdisk until specifically committed to flash memory. I don't know if any of this would be possible for windows.
Click to expand...


The reason being (for those that don't know) CF cards have limited read/write life cycles. IIRC you can read infinitely from the drive, but you can only delete and re-write data a certain number of times, and if you are paging a lot you will definitely exceed that limit. ULTRA series CF cards have pretty decent IO rates, something like 12-15MBPS and seek times are very low. I made a car-pc with linux and a touch screen but couldn't find a feasible way to mount it in my car so I scrapped it.
 
Originally posted by: quizzelsnatch
Operating system being Windows XP Home SP2. I was wondering about installing a complete version of windows xp onto a flash drive. I'm almost certain it's possible. However, i was wondering is it practicle? Is there a speed difference? Link to benchmarks?
Click to expand...


I'm fairly certain it is possible also. Unless you are refering to a USB flash drive.
I have run both a non-GUI linux and dos on a compact flash drive.
NewEgg has a ide to compact adapter and 4+ gig compact flash cards. The computer sees these as a hard drive. A very fast hard drive. I think compact flash access times are mesured in Nano-seconds.
If you are going to use this long term with windows or linux. You may want to use 2 adapters 1 with a 1 gig compact flash to be used for swap memory. In linux if you have enough system memory you can disable swap.
Someone on the Beatrix site is running Beatrix from a 2-gig compact flash and a external USB hard drive for storage. My Ubuntu installation is currently using less than 4 gig's. I am thinking about trying an install on a 4 gig flash and a 512 meg flash for swap.

Note: The adapters I have are ATA 33.
Note 2: When I was setting up dos for playing older games. I put the compact flash in a USB reader and set the computer to boot from USB and dos booted up and ran.:Q


Kwatt
 
Installed PE to a USB device before. If the system can boot from it, it should work.

Caveat, Firewire is still out of the picture. Last time I researched it, Firewire would only boot on a Mac.

Edit - Actually, one of my partners in crime at work has been running XP on a USB drive. Forgot about that as it was about 2 years ago.
 
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