|
22 Mar 2004, 19:42
|
#1
|
Godfather
Join Date: May 2000
Location: England
Posts: 5,185
|
Booting from a DVD
Not strictly 'booting from' but actually having the entire OS on a dvd....
heres what im thinking :
Copy the entire OS to a DVD (4.2gig of space so it should fit fine).
turn of the hdd by unplugging the cable.
Turning on the PC and booting from the DVD.
assigning 200meg of RAM to a virtual drive that can be used by windows for porting things about etc and then use the dvd to just browse the net and do non-disk space intensive tasks.
Reasons : No HDD = No HDD Noise which means at night its quieter.
Also it might be possible to have different DVD's with different OS's on.
Now :
a) Is this possible.
b) How would i go about doing it if a) is yes
c) How would i go about doing it with linux etc. and not just XP
__________________
Forum Administrator
Mail : [email protected] // IRC : #forums
__________________
It's not personal, it's just business.
|
|
|
22 Mar 2004, 19:58
|
#2
|
Let battle commence
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: England
Posts: 732
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
Quote:
Originally Posted by JammyJim
Reasons : No HDD = No HDD Noise which means at night its quieter.
Also it might be possible to have different DVD's with different OS's on.
Now :
a) Is this possible.
b) How would i go about doing it if a) is yes
c) How would i go about doing it with linux etc. and not just XP
|
I wouldn't lke to boot windows from a CD, i know 3.1 / 95 CAN be booted from CD, but they were slower than off a HD, and, imo noisier When in use. Get ur HD to spin down when not used? (after say 15mins idle? - power management) - to go with that, there'd be MORE noise from a CD spinning up if windows needed it during the night, than a harddisk
As for Linux. ISO Linux (Knoppix being a good 'on cd ready to use' distro - http://www.knoppix.org/)
__________________
Mit
http://tim.igoe.me.uk - Development Blog
Whats on TV now - UK TV Guide
<Mendosa> mit is a cute cudlly toy that will be in the shops by christmas
<mig-work> ur now my eternal fav pa god
<Squiz> i name thee, Sir Mit
<Zeus> u my friend are a true gamer I knew u were
|
|
|
22 Mar 2004, 20:04
|
#3
|
Godfather
Join Date: May 2000
Location: England
Posts: 5,185
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
This knoppix business.....
Does it boot directly from a CD and wont infact screw up windows xp or anything my pc?
If so i shall download. burn and reboot and see what happens.
Also windows/linux would only be used for web browsing and thats it.
__________________
Forum Administrator
Mail : [email protected] // IRC : #forums
__________________
It's not personal, it's just business.
|
|
|
22 Mar 2004, 20:07
|
#4
|
Godfather
Join Date: May 2000
Location: England
Posts: 5,185
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
i..e when i take out the cd and reboot its like i never saw linux on this pc...
__________________
Forum Administrator
Mail : [email protected] // IRC : #forums
__________________
It's not personal, it's just business.
|
|
|
22 Mar 2004, 20:19
|
#5
|
Let battle commence
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: England
Posts: 732
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
Knoppix WON'T touch ur Hard disk (unless you ask it to) - Knoppix will allow more than just webbrowsing (full word processing etc, even SOME basic games)
Correct, it boots soley from the CD.
__________________
Mit
http://tim.igoe.me.uk - Development Blog
Whats on TV now - UK TV Guide
<Mendosa> mit is a cute cudlly toy that will be in the shops by christmas
<mig-work> ur now my eternal fav pa god
<Squiz> i name thee, Sir Mit
<Zeus> u my friend are a true gamer I knew u were
|
|
|
23 Mar 2004, 15:16
|
#6
|
Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2002
Location: South Pacific
Posts: 4,911
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
how about fli4l? an operating system and server on a floppy disk
__________________
I think it's time we blow this scene, get everybody and the stuff together..........
ok 3..... 2..... 1.. let's jam
|
|
|
23 Mar 2004, 15:55
|
#7
|
Born Sinful
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Loughborough, UK
Posts: 4,059
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
Modern versions of windows cannot be run from read-only media, as they MUST have write access to certain files - this is a design flaw obviously, but could be ways round it. I'm not sure how well any of these would work in practise, but...
a) USB flash drives have reached the 1gb mark, and I wouldn't be surprised to see 1.5 and 2gb versions before too long. There are utilities available that format flashdrives as bootable media - and most modern BIOSes (for modern, read within the last year or so) support booting from USB flash drives. Make flashdrive bootable, copy over a preinstalled windows image, boot. It should be possible in theory.
There are two drawbacks: Firstly, drives of that size cost upwards of £200. Secondly, they're slow.
b) If you have stupid ammounts of ram you could have a DVD that contains an image of a minimal windows install (to fit it in ram) and a boot script that sets up a ramdisk. Bootscript extracts image to ramdisk and boots it. This is much like the linux 2.4 boot procedure - initrd (short for initial ramdisk) runs first, loads the kernel into memory from it's image on whatever boot media it lives on (could be harddisk, cd, floppy, etc) and runs it. However, I wouldn't have a clue how to go about doing this or if it would work. Maybe someone else has tried it if you look on google?
__________________
Worth dying for. Worth killing for. Worth going to hell for. Amen.
|
|
|
23 Mar 2004, 21:48
|
#8
|
Registered User
Join Date: Aug 2000
Posts: 1,967
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
Its not a design flaw. MS has a windows that will run without a HD. Its for for appliances.
|
|
|
24 Mar 2004, 10:11
|
#9
|
Clerk
Join Date: Jun 2001
Posts: 13,940
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
There are PC's they advertise in PC Magazines (or used to) with 2GB+ RAM which specifically run off RAM virtual disks (RAD volumes as they used to be in the Amiga days).
On the Flash drives one, what about USB2 drives? Would they still be noticably too slow?
|
|
|
26 Mar 2004, 00:43
|
#10
|
Ball
Join Date: Oct 2001
Posts: 4,410
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
An option I've been playing with recently is network booting. I booted this laptop over the network, set up an encrypted filesystem, then burnt a bootable CD with the encryption keys on. That's more for diskless clients than for the kind of demonstration you describe though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by meglamaniac
b) If you have stupid ammounts of ram you could have a DVD that contains an image of a minimal windows install (to fit it in ram) and a boot script that sets up a ramdisk. [...]?
|
This is what Knoppix does. Except you don't need to extract everything to the ramdisk. Just have the files that need to be written to. Debian has a package, bootcd, which does the whole procedure for you and burns a CD that boots diskless with your current configuration.
Wikipedia seems to have a list of some LiveCD's. It also suggests there are Windows LiveCD's around. One interesting option is the Gentoo LiveCD with the Unreal Tournament demo.
I love my Knoppix CD. I've got 3.2 which couldn't write to NTFS if it wanted to, but 3.4 is supposed to have Captive which allows you to use Windows' NTFS drivers, if they are installed on the disc, to write to NTFS. My main complaint is that the KDE startup sound and shutdown sound and wallpaper are gay.
Last edited by queball; 26 Mar 2004 at 00:49.
|
|
|
26 Mar 2004, 00:54
|
#11
|
Ball
Join Date: Oct 2001
Posts: 4,410
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
Quote:
Originally Posted by JammyJim
Reasons : No HDD = No HDD Noise which means at night its quieter.
|
Unfortunately, with Knoppix you still get the CD spin sound occasionally because it only partially loads into memory. You'd have to look at something more customised as far as I know. *ponder*
|
|
|
15 Apr 2004, 02:41
|
#12
|
Registered User
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 10
|
Re: Booting from a DVD
Quote:
Originally Posted by Intrepid00
Its not a design flaw. MS has a windows that will run without a HD. Its for for appliances.
|
Technically, thats not really Windoze. And the only way that these semi-windows OS's work on a non-hard drive system is that it uses flash memory in it's place. When a "hard-drive-less Windows" was mentioned in this thread, it obviously referred to a non-solid-state-storage version of Windows. Don't take everything so literally ;-p
|
|
|
|
All times are GMT +1. The time now is 15:09.
| |