Operating System on a SD card?

**ItsRobsLife** · 27-10-2009, 02:17 AM

Ok it's a bit of an odd thought and as I'm not really into the technical aspects of computers it could be complete nonsense, but...

Sd cards are robust and portable and now have huge capacity, at least 32Gb.

Windows 2000 is a reliable, no frills operating system.

Would it be possible to install Win2000 onto a Sd card?

Would you then be able to use that in a computer via usb and use the OS on the card instead of the OS in the host computer?

Why? Well any restrictions or malware and temp files/history on the computer would be in the host OS I assume.

Would you need to add anything to the SD or tweak the program to make the OS work?

Could you partition part of the SD to use as memory?

Would the OS be able to retrieve and store the memory from the same card?

Well there's a few more questions, but I'd like to know if it's feasable.

Cheers.

**dirtydog** · 27-10-2009, 03:06 AM

You can do it with linux, doubt you can from windows.

**paranha** · 27-10-2009, 03:15 AM

Have never tried with windows.

It's fully possible to put an OS on a SD card and boot it but I don't think that I would try to install a fully bootable modern OS on a SD card. The word "slow" should ring a bell.

Before somebody arrest me on this issue - I do run an XD card setup on an old school computer system for convenience of getting the programs done. Have never tried to do this on a modern computer system with a modern OS

Back home in Sweden I have installed Workbench 1.3 with a lot of progz on a XD card connected to my Amiga 1200 (the Workbench will install on a 880k discette and still have around 300k left on it) but had to use some hardware extensions to get this to work.

**dirtydog** · 27-10-2009, 03:21 AM

Linux ubuntu booting from a disc takes about a minute and you run from that, ie if you had a clean hdd with nothing on with ubuntu you can be online in less than a minute.

**ItsRobsLife** · 27-10-2009, 04:20 AM

So you could use Linux instead of Windows on an Sd card.

Could you then bypass the host OS and run your own OS?

Would you need to add anything more and could you use the extra space on the Sd as memory?

**dirtydog** · 27-10-2009, 04:44 AM

Yes to all your questions, El Gibbon done a thread on setting up something like this.

**Butterfly** · 27-10-2009, 08:19 AM

BartPE will setup WinXP or Win2000 on a removable media, very convenient for special "rescue" or "virus cleaning"

**Thetyim** · 27-10-2009, 08:51 AM

I ran XP Pro from a USB Drive and it was slow.
A faster flashdrive would speed it up a bit but you still need to have a hard disk installed

**harrybarracuda** · 27-10-2009, 06:16 PM

If you really have a need to avoid hard disks, just use a solid state drive (Runcore make them).

The thing about SSDs is they are fast read and slow write. You can play about with Linux to minimise the writes, but if you try and remove a Windows swap file it gets very arsey, so I really wouldn't recommend doing that.

I'm running Windows 7 on an SSD (with plenty of memory) and it works just fine.

But why Windows 2000? For the love of God, man, please just let it die

**zubber** · 27-10-2009, 06:23 PM

this is expected to happen in a year or two

**Butterfly** · 27-10-2009, 06:59 PM

Win2000 has a small footprint, and it's more stable than anything

**Missismiggins** · 27-10-2009, 07:34 PM

Would there not be an issue with the number of writes/rewrites to an SD card? don't they have some sort of "counter" that will shut them down after a certain number of writes?

**harrybarracuda** · 04-11-2009, 02:29 PM

There's a lot of ill-informed comments about SSDs having a limited number of read/write cycles and therefore not lasting the pace. While that is essentially true, the technological improvements in SSD technology are almost exponential. I can remember when a 128Mb Flash Drive was considered HUGE, now you can pick up a pocket 64Gb flash drive for around Bt6,000.

The number of read/write cycles early SSDs could manage was around 10,000 cycle per cell. Which made them fine for copying files to take home and work on, for example. But now they are in the millions (perhaps even tens of millions) per cell. And you have GIGABYTES of cells. And you have SMART, and other hardware features to automatically isolate the odd cell that does go wrong.

To quote from some 2007 research (and imagine the improvements since then!):

"We assume perfect wear leveling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit.

2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds.

That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give...

The end result is 51 years!"

By the time 20 years has elapsed we'll be looking at 3 gazillion terabyte flash drives to hold 3D VFHDIIFLATILAFR video (very f**king high definition indeed in fact look at that it looks almost F**king real).

So no, nowadays, it really isn't an issue.

In fact, as far as Mean Time Between Failure is concerned, your average hard disk is probably more susceptible because of the moving parts, friction, vibration, etc.

Like I said in another thread, I opted for a 64Gb SSD in my netbook instead of a 160Gb hard disk. Windows 7 still runs fine, but the battery life as probably double.

**Butterfly** · 04-11-2009, 02:35 PM

^ 64GB SSD ? what's the risk of failure of that one ? how do you connect to it ? IDE or SDSLOT ?

**harrybarracuda** · 04-11-2009, 03:03 PM

On the ASUS, it fits in the same slot as a 2.5" SATA notebook hard drive; I'd assume it's the same on other laptops.

In fact, looking at their site, my information about the speeds is out of date as well.

RunCore SSD

DaffyDuck · 05-11-2009, 12:57 AM

Originally Posted by Butterfly

^ 64GB SSD ? what's the risk of failure of that one ? how do you connect to it ? IDE or SDSLOT ?

You haven't really kept up to date over the past few years, have you?

SSD's come in SATA flavors (early ones were PATA). Current SSD's are the same form factor as a 2.5" SATA laptop drive.

Smaller ones, like the ones used in the MacBook Air and iPods, have a miniature version of the same interfaces.

Finally, putting the Operating System on a Flash drive is very possible - I do it regularly with my Mac OS X installation and maintenance disks, and it's quite effective and fast -- IF YOU PICK A FAST USB Flash drive!!!

Most flash drives do not provide speed information, so better shop around by reading reviews of the various brands you pick. I have had excellent results with the16GB Patriot RAZZO drives.

**harrybarracuda** · 05-11-2009, 03:26 PM

Daffy,

I picked the Runcore for that exact reason; most of the reviews i read stated that not only were they the fastest, but their error handling capabilities were the best as well.

DaffyDuck · 05-11-2009, 04:20 PM

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Daffy,

I picked the Runcore for that exact reason; most of the reviews i read stated that not only were they the fastest, but their error handling capabilities were the best as well.

Yes, the runcores are great (though suck at write speeds), but I have the impression that the OP was looking for a maintenance or rescue disk on SD -- and flash drives are less expensive and have faster write speeds. Any 8gb to 16gb flash drive should do the trick.

**Butterfly** · 05-11-2009, 04:55 PM

Originally Posted by DaffyDuck

You haven't really kept up to date over the past few years, have you?

on SSD ? no, better things to do

how expensive are they ? how reliable are they ? what's the major drawback ?

**ItsRobsLife** · 05-11-2009, 11:06 PM

Originally Posted by DaffyDuck

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Daffy,

I picked the Runcore for that exact reason; most of the reviews i read stated that not only were they the fastest, but their error handling capabilities were the best as well.

Yes, the runcores are great (though suck at write speeds), but I have the impression that the OP was looking for a maintenance or rescue disk on SD -- and flash drives are less expensive and have faster write speeds. Any 8gb to 16gb flash drive should do the trick.

Actually what I'm interested in is bypassing the host OS of a public computer, so that the system I'm using is secure against spy/malware.

So for that a SD rather than a SSD would be more convenient and discrete.

**baldrick** · 06-11-2009, 09:51 AM

a usb stick would be better

but you must be able to access the BIOS to be able to tell it to boot fromm USB , and some older computers will not be able to boot from USB

pendrivelinux.com is a good place to start reading.

and if you really must use a windows based OS UBCD4win can be done on a USB drive using bartPE and selinux - not too hard if you can follow instructions

**ItsRobsLife** · 06-11-2009, 12:28 PM

Cheers Baldrick. I knew you'd have the juice on this one.

**harrybarracuda** · 16-11-2009, 04:32 PM

For an easy way to create Bootable USB's from *most* distros, have a look at UNETBOOTIN (It's a Sourceforge project).

Baldrick's right, PCs either don't support USB boot (i.e. old ones) or it has to be enabled through the BIOS.

But on most PCs, you can boot from a Live CD, and you can pick your choice from DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.. I'd always recommend Ubuntu because of ease of use and the wide variety of hardware it supports without too much tweaking.

Of course, I'd go for cargo pants if you want to be discreet, it's much easier to sneak around with a USB in your trouser pockets

**Butterfly** · 18-11-2009, 09:37 AM

Splashtop on USB

Splashtop on USB stick - Phoronix Forums

**harrybarracuda** · 19-11-2009, 04:54 PM

I reckon there's about a 99% chance of me bolloxing my netbook if I tried this. It looks to me as if Splashtop is still a bit gimmicky. Reading the analysis of this you can't do much with it at all, if you need to do any configuration.

It's an interesting read, though. Shame they can't port some of this knowledge into OS development. I mean, if you just want to browse the web and check your emails, you shouldn't have to load a whole frigging OS should you?

But this doesn't go quite far enough by the looks of it.

Let's see how it develops.

Thanks for that, Butterfly.

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