Possible to pull a live USB drive out in the middle of running the OS?

[chrstrbrts]

Hello,

I ran Ubuntu live from a bootable USB and yanked the drive after the OS booted and I launched a few user processes.

The computer got buggy and eventually crashed.

I can only assume that this is because only a portion of the OS was loaded into RAM to begin with and that when the USB was yanked the processes no longer had access to the swap space.

Are there any OSs that can be run live and be totally loaded into RAM in such a way that you can yank the USB, DVD, SD card, etc. after booting and still have the computer run perfectly?

I understand that this means that I will have to sacrifice a swap space and that I'll probably only be able to run one user process at a time, but I'm curious if I can do this none the less.

 

[Red Squirrel]

You should be able to, there may be a risk of corrupting stuff, and any new program you try to launch within the live image probably won't load. Some live OSes may possibly fully load into a ram drive though so it only needs the stick for the initial booting process, but I'm not sure if they're all that way or how to find out without trying them all.

 

[lxskllr]

You can do that with Puppy, and other ultralight distros. The big ones are too big, and it would be unreasonable to load everything they have into ram, though you could probably hack something together yourself to do that if you have a huge amount of ram.

edit:
Here's a list from Wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM

 

[dave_the_nerd]

ESX will also keep soldiering on for a while after pulling out the boot drive. (Like, a month before I caught it, because I suck sometimes.)