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Linux Laptop w/ 3.5" Disk, USB, and No Hard Drive?
Posted by
Cliff
on Tue Jul 06, 2004 05:08 PM
from the how-would-you-do-it dept.
from the how-would-you-do-it dept.
ryewell asks: "I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive being the most important stats I would assume for this question. So my hard drive died, and I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.Would it be possible to boot the laptop in Linux using a 3.5 disk, then using drivers access the USB memory stick that had an adequate Linux system on it?" With USB thumb drives getting to be as large as 512 megs, memory sticks weighing in at 1 gig, and Compact Flash cards getting into the 2 gig range, this might not be such a bad idea. There's the Linux Mobile System that looks to implement something like this, but are there other distributions or similar projects that might be of interest? If you were going to put together a custom system for something like this, how would you do it?
"If Linux can be configured this way, I would need no hard drive, and the created docs/info could be saved on the USB drive memory stick. This way, no hard drive means no moving parts, which means better battery life, and I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US after taxes, shipping, etc. And how cool would it be to run a laptop off of a memory stick! Unfortunately, I know nothing about Linux, but this might be a cool problem to solve for those smart and knowledgeable enough to figure it out. Thanks for any help you can provide!"
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I would not use MemoryStick (Score:5, Informative)
I would use a CF card and ATA adapter.
I would also keep in mind that write times for CF devices can be ...g...l...a...c...i...a...l compared to disk.
Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:4, Informative)
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Card services and Hard Drives. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd just get another hard drive. If the system does not have a CD, do the install on another machine, move it and tweak it as required. Mepis [mepis.org] and other Knoppix based distributions should work without much or any modification. Moreover, they should work very well on that hardware
microdrives etc (Score:4, Informative)
MPIO HS100 1.5GB HDD Portable Storage [mpio.com]
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Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:3, Informative)
Reading, not your strong point.
From the article:
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"
Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:5, Informative)
Searching for a deal, not the posters strong point.
I just recently bought a new 20GB laptop drive, 5400rpm, for $80. If you look on eBay, you can find them in the 2 - 4GB range for around $15 - $30.
Parent
Junk on ebay (Score:5, Interesting)
I buy lots of laptop stuff on ebay and I rebuild IBM lappys as a hobby. Back when I first started doing this I looked at the price of brand new, fully warranteed drives and decided to just buy a few cheap used ones. Of the three I bought (for a total of more than $100) I have zero functional units less than six months later. The first one (Sony - I should have known) accepted a format and then started clicking a week later, the second (Fujitsu) lasted a couple of months. The genuine IBM drive lasted almost four months before it, too, started clicking one day while at the library - just as I was about to complete a 4GB ISO download.
From then on I buy "expensive" new drives with warranties. Spending $100 on a new drive every couple of years makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $30 every other month on JUNK.
Speaking more directly to the topic, my latest pet is a 500MHz 600 that is being fitted with a custom case and battery pack and internal USB hub and wireless. It will have only one external PCMCIA slot because the other will be permanently occupied by a USB2 card (which will, in turn, talk to the internal wireless USB dongle and USB 10/100 NIC) - but I will be able to refit my machine to a speedy 750MHz or more at my leisure, spare parts are dirt cheap, and I won't have to be a slave to the $60 semi-annual Lithium toss, instead just replacing NiMH cells as they expire.
And the way I'm making room for much of this is by replacing the $80 20GB 2.5" drive with a cool new $110 20GB 1.8" drive. Just a few slight internal adjustments and my one-off geekpad will become the one to rule the world via USB!
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Re:Junk on ebay (Score:4, Informative)
I use a Toshiba 486-100 machine with a wireless card in it to browse the web away from the machine room, i.e. on the back porch. It's a good little system.
Parent
Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:I would not use MemoryStick (Score:4, Informative)
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Probably Knoppix (Score:4, Insightful)
Your best bet is to try Knoppix, assuming you have a CD-ROM.
Re:Probably Knoppix (Score:3, Interesting)
My plan is to come up with a boot image that will spit out only busybox, the stuff I absolutely need, do DHCP configuration (probably in the kernel) and contact an X server via XDMCP. But then, I don't want to use it for a computer, just an X terminal.
I LOVE GOOGLE. (Score:5, Informative)
Small Linux (Score:5, Informative)
quit being a cheap bastard (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:quit being a cheap bastard (Score:4, Interesting)
b) Maybe he'd like to use that Linux/USB combo elsewhere
c) Maybe he just likes to try a geeky project
I'd be kinda cool if you could have your system everywhere with a floppy and an USB key (much more typical than USB boot, at least).
Kjella
Parent
Why boot from floppy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why boot from floppy? (Score:5, Funny)
Its a IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive.
And u think the bios will support booting of a usb memory stick ????
Parent
Re:Why boot from floppy? (Score:3, Informative)
Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb card (Score:5, Informative)
allows you to boot off a usb card and does not require a hard drive. Damn small linux and dynebolic are two other distros that work well with underpowered hardware and don't require harddrives but they both require cd drives.
There is a more practical solution (Score:5, Informative)
Limited lifespan (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Limited lifespan (Score:5, Informative)
Correct, and that is the main limitation of such devices. Just off the top of my head here, I can come up with an idea that just might work, but the OP had better be damn well prepared to use a very lightweight distro.
Step 1: Partition that USB drive. You're going to need a very small / partition, and a much larger /usr partition. These are not to be messed with. You'll also need a /home-flash partition large enough for your personal use, and of course, a backup plan for when that drive fails. /var. You can modify your init scripts to populate this directory safely. Symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, and now you've cut down a lot of your writes to your flash device. /home. Again, your init scripts can safely populate this with all your dot-files. Anything you definately want to save must be manually copied to the /home-flash partition. Optionally you can take a look at the scripts included with Slax [slax.org]. One script (IIRC configsave) will make a tar.gz of all those pertinant files and save them to a partition on a USB flash drive.
Step 2: Build your kernel. This can be tricky. Building a kernel that accesses the USB drive can't be that difficult, but you'll also need initrd support. Why? Well, because you've got 128 MB of RAM, and you certainly don't want to write to that flash drive all the time. Make a small, perhaps 32 MB initrd and mount it at
Step 3: Make yourself another 32MB initrd and mount it a
It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once. If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a /var, and make /home a symlink to /var/home.
Parent
Just Buy A Hard Drive (Score:3)
For $130 you could get a new laptop (Score:4)
It would be nice if you could do what you're trying to do though. Then you could take your OS with you and use any modern computer with your OS and your settings in theory.
I'm just wondering how slowly linux would load up off of usb 1.1?
Cake (Score:3, Informative)
Also when building the kernel try to minimize the number of modules you build. Build things into the bzimage if you have the option. But at the same time only include the bare minimum things necessary.
Lastly when you are building things with gcc be sure to use Os to optimize for size.
Since its an x86 system if the USB drive is supported by the kernel this shouldn't be difficult at all.
What about ZipSlack (Score:3, Informative)
All you need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Make a short script to mount the external media on boot up, and install everything you need from there.
Obviously, having another computer running a BSD or Linux distro will greatly help you achieve this.
Don't be surprised if the fruits of your labor yield a very fast graphical linux box.
I use a CF adapter in my notebook. (Score:5, Informative)
http://store.ituner.com/ituner/emstcfl.html [ituner.com]
It works great, i am using a 256 meg sandisk compact flash card and feather linux.
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/ [berlios.de]
Overall the performance is not too bad. Battery life is MUCH better without the hard drive. Write speed is not too great, but since I usually ssh into my server and leech from there, i dont need to worry about that much...
it's possible (Score:5, Informative)
Some examples of Linux distros that do this are:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/byld
http:
But I really think you are looking for this:
http://linuxmobile.sourceforge.net/
Linux Mobile System (LMS) is a full Linux system whose support is the new USB Flash Memory Drives. The intention is to boot any PC with USB support with our system and therefore we will have every administration and analysis applications that we have selected, so we will not need install it. This way, always we will be able to get our Linux system ready to use in our pocket.
Now if you cannot boot the laptop with the USB connection I am sure you can use a mini/micro distrobution to boot the system with USB support and then have it read and run off the USB drive.
I hope this information is helpful in your quest. =P
Look at the different Linux Thin Clients (Score:4, Informative)
look harder? (Score:3, Informative)
not worth it (Score:3, Informative)
consider:
- your time
- the cost of USB/CF sticks
- the usability of the setup (slow)
all of it would add up to more than the $130 or whatever for the HD.
it would be just a case of hacking up your own custom kernel and mounting the USB stick.
I do this... occasionally (Score:4, Informative)
Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards (Score:5, Informative)
1. Memory Cards usually have a "number of write times" which is sometimes around 100,000 writes. This is much more than enough when you're using the card for saving photos, and a card could probably last you a lifetime for this purpose. However, when you put an operating system with a swap filesystem on it, which reads/writes tons of times constantly, 100,000 becomes very restrictive and you could easily damage the card in a month or so depending on ussage. NOTE however that not all cards are created equal, so do some research on this. Try searching for MTBF (mean time between failures) along with the type of card you're planning on using on google.
2. Although it is true many flash cards are slow compared to hard drives, some can be as fast or faster (depending on your system). For example, the SanDisk Ultra II CF cards have a *minimum* sustained write speed of 9 MB/s (that's MegaBytes per second, or aprox. 72 Megabits per second) which is VERY fast (however I do not know its MTBF specs). You can get such a 1GB card for about US$220. However, nowdays it is still MUCH cheaper to buy a hard drive.
The real reason to not want the hard drive (Score:5, Informative)
There are linux distros that will boot and run from CD-rom, but of course they access the noisy cd-rom all the time.
There are network based distros but they go so overboard, they want to get everything from the LAN, which is not so fast and slow to boot up.
In fact, in many cases the hard drive in the laptop is still there, it's just not perfectly silent.
I would like a distro which booted from hard drive (or CD-rom, or floppy) and after loading what it wanted, and mounting network filesystems, shut down the noisy boot device for good, or at least until some unusual activity called for it.
Knoppix + Boot Floppy (Score:5, Insightful)
Booting Knoppix will eliminate the need for massive amounts of read/write, and you'd still have a bit of space to store whatever it is you are working on.
A delimma faced many times (Score:3, Informative)
And they are so easy to use too...
Oh well.....A USB-CDROM boot option in the BIOS looks promising.
How-switch, Multi-OS capability? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think my ideas below and my question above come from my curiosity of how long the portable/hand-held DVD players last. I also wonder how long MP3 device batteries last. Days? Aside from the LCD and CPU chewing up maybe 60% of the battery life, at LEAST the storage and boot and system file devices could be on CF/Smart Media. Maybe someone might want to take the LSB to a new level: Optimizing the installation and locating of system files based on the type of medium to which the OS and user files are being written during install. And, suspend-to-disk, ACPI, and APM problems could be made to go away to a good extent, probably because the disk spinning is eliminated. i am not sure about communicating devices (modems and NICs), tho.
Imagine this:
-- Multi-slot CF/Smart-Media bay
-- O/S Memory sticks/ in each CF/SM bay
-- Energy-efficient/Solar or ambient-light-powered LCD
-- Ability to swap O/S on the fly
-- IR or compatible/comparable input device with own power supply (like the battery-powered Logitech mice...)
Can't laptops go Solid State now? I imagine much of the laptop industry is sustained by momentum to keep cranking out mechanical disks. If an efficient CF/SM platter or storage surface can be optically read by something that is not having to spin at some 7,000 or 10,000 RPM, a lot of other savings might be made.
Also, it seems laptop boards have fewer and fewer soldered components. Further reductions should lead to greater opportunity to bring solid-state laptops to consumer hands. If the OS could be on one the disk, and be swappable, the data on another swappable, disk, then when will a light switch on to make solid-state laptops that hold VMWare or Win4Lin in a Linux environment? VMWare and NeTraverse could then reduce their costs of product just by jumping to distribution/deployment of millions vice 10s of thousands. This would probably devastate ms' foothold, especially of XUL or XML or other code and W3C standards were followed better.
Here's an actual useful answer for your query (Score:4, Informative)
One of the best resources I've found so far is over at damnsmalllinux.org (in the forum, here [damnsmalllinux.org] they have a pretty good how-to on this. I also found a really good discussion of it in the Gentoo forums somewhere, but I forgot to sync my firefox bookmarks today, so I don't have it.
For the project Im working on I can't use a hard drive, but Ive got heaps of memory - so Im just going to use ramdisk for swap space and stuff. That gets around the trashing your key thing. Probably not an option for an old lappy though! Good luck!
Damn Small Linux... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:good point (Score:5, Informative)
In most cases it is easier to do if you already have a linux box to work with.
A really good place to start with would be http://www.8ung.at/spblinux/
Apparently this guy is using XDirectFB and a couple of floppies and you can have a full X running to surf the web. He has a USB versino somewhere on the site. In fact check out his usbboot setup.
Parent
Re:Why Bother? (Score:5, Informative)
One is dead silent, always on, network monitor (running tkined/scotty).
Another is my SMS/Voice gateway.
A third (which is actually a P90) is my wireless Mud client.
So don't say that slow old laptops are useless, just because you can't play the lastest games on 'em.
Parent
Re:Why Bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why Bother? (Score:3, Insightful)
To be honest, I would rather use it for none graphical applications (web server, dns, etc).
Win98 (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything runs fine and I'm not even using a stripped down linux (which I'm sure would smoke!).
Give me your old hardware.
Parent
Re:Why Bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
And you suggest trashing his adequate-for-the-purpose machine and buying a top-of-the-line power hog would be saving in some sense.
On the topic of what time costs. I consider my free time absolutely worthless. I waste it on drinking, reading slashdot or watching cartoons anyway. I would find a nice hardware hacking project much more better value for my time than my usual activities.
I made Linux 2.2 (with some basic software) run on 25mhz 486dx with 8 megs of memory just for the challenge of it. Learned hell of a lot of how Linux works in the process too. I say, to the original author: Go for it!
#linux on IRCNet is very helpfull if you show atleast moderate experience so they can actually instruct you without teaching how to use an editor first.
I wonder what this post cost me. Took many minutes to proof read it, and actually check the specs of the old beast in the closet.
Parent
Re:Why Bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF?! I was laid off six months ago, and I haven't found work yet, so as you can imagine money is extremely tight. I don't have a laptop, and I certainly can't afford one, but I'd still love to have something that would let me hang out in the bedroom with my wife and play with Python scripts while watching TV. Before you drive over another older laptop, let me know, I may be within driving distance to come take it off your hands and give it a good home. You seem to have a very different idea of "good enough" than I do.
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