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Author Topic: Run OS from thumb drive?  (Read 1309 times)

davidnix71

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Run OS from thumb drive?
« on: 8 March 2006, 02:35 »
I bought a refurb mp4-dvr/camera/usb 2.0 disk/mp3 player called iJoy for $80. The refurb part apparently is that I have to format the sd cards on a pc first, the iJoy won't do it anymore. The iJoy uses a Nokia 7210 cell phone battery or runs off the usb port if you plug it in.

Not content with the 128mb card that came with it, I went surfing for something bigger. I found and bought a 2 GB card and usb 2.0 thumb drive that uses sd cards together for another $80. There are 4 GB sd cards available but they are a lot more money.

If 2 gig fits on a card the size of a postage stamp and runs on the port power, is it possible to put an OS on a thumb drive and boot from it? 2 gig is more than enough for an OS and plenty of programs. Not every computer has a dvd drive, but usb is universal. It might be easier to boot from a cd and them plug in the thumb drive, but that would mean carrying around the disk.
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Lead Head

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #1 on: 8 March 2006, 02:39 »
There has already been linux put on something like 512MB thumb drives, but if you are going to use a tumb drive you should have 512MB of ram or more because the amount of disk swaps to the tumb drive may kill it rather fast
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H_TeXMeX_H

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #2 on: 8 March 2006, 04:44 »
Well the fact is that having a swap partition on any flash media (such as a usb thumb drive) will end up destroying it in the end. That's because flash drives have a limited number of writes ... and they get slower at reading and writing with use. Maybe if it were possible to not have a swap partition ... just use ram ... or heck every computer has a swap partition ... why not make it use that one ?
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Pathos

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #3 on: 8 March 2006, 05:47 »
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

only 50mb and lots of support for usb based linux.
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Aloone_Jonez

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #4 on: 13 March 2006, 17:04 »
Knoppix will run with only 128MB of RAM and no swap partition but I'd recommend >256MB of RAM if you want to do anything worthwhile with it.
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ReggieMicheals

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #5 on: 13 March 2006, 19:17 »
QNX can run off of a floppy disk with a GUI. It has some bad color depth to it though...

ClosedBSD can also run off a floppy, no gui system, though...

eComStation, Various linux distros, Plan 9, and BeOS all can boot from a CD.

There are many others, and you may boot off the USB if the BIOS allows it...
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Refalm

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #6 on: 13 March 2006, 20:04 »
Quote from: ReggieMicheals
QNX can run off of a floppy disk with a GUI. It has some bad color depth to it though...

The colour depth was okay by me, it was the lack of ethernet drivers that was disappointing.
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ReggieMicheals

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #7 on: 13 March 2006, 22:59 »
I mean, it doesn't go over 8-16 bit color depth..on my monitor due to some driver problems
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mobrien_12

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #8 on: 14 March 2006, 01:36 »
You can run linux without swap pretty easily.  I have Fedora Core 4 running right now with KDE and mozilla and xemacs and konqueror and a bunch of other little stuff running.  I have 512 MB and the free command says I have 22 MB RAM unused and 600 kb of the swap file used (some of the swap file is always used if you have one on). Plus theres 254 MB cached... which could be freed up for applications if needed.

Off topic, it's really refreshing compared to the early 2.4 kernels.  Back then the development team decided to start flushing data to swap if it hadn't been used for a while, whether you had free RAM or not.  The idea was to maximize RAM for disk caches, but it was really annoying as a desktop user because it would slow down application switching.
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cymon

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #9 on: 14 March 2006, 01:53 »
USB isn't really that fast, even version 2. Besides, any machine old enough that you might need to make use of the swap would probably have version 1. Though a SCSI flash drive would be sweet.
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Refalm

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #10 on: 14 March 2006, 09:30 »
Quote from: ReggieMicheals
I mean, it doesn't go over 8-16 bit color depth..on my monitor due to some driver problems

Yes, and that is where you went wrong. You made it sound like QNX couldn't do 24 bit colour depth, while the problem was due to your unsupported video card.
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Aloone_Jonez

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #11 on: 14 March 2006, 10:27 »
Quote from: mobrien_12

Off topic, it's really refreshing compared to the early 2.4 kernels.  Back then the development team decided to start flushing data to swap if it hadn't been used for a while, whether you had free RAM or not.  The idea was to maximize RAM for disk caches, but it was really annoying as a desktop user because it would slow down application switching.

That's exactly what Windows does.
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WMD

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #12 on: 14 March 2006, 21:16 »
Quote from: Refalm
The colour depth was okay by me, it was the lack of ethernet drivers that was disappointing.

Heh, yeah.  I brought the QNX ethernet floppy to school once.  We have a back room filled with stuff, and I had to dig around for quite a while before I found a 3c509 card, which is an old ISA thing.  Worked fine, but it only supports that and one other old ISA ethernet chipset.
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mobrien_12

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Re: Run OS from thumb drive?
« Reply #13 on: 15 March 2006, 04:31 »
Quote from: WMD
Heh, yeah.  I brought the QNX ethernet floppy to school once.  We have a back room filled with stuff, and I had to dig around for quite a while before I found a 3c509 card, which is an old ISA thing.  Worked fine, but it only supports that and one other old ISA ethernet chipset.


Yeesh.  The 3c509 was my favorite ISA ethernet board, but I'd never want to go back to ISA ethernet.  No Bus Mastering, 10 Mbs max speed....
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