Faster - Smaller Boot Floppy!

[Dave_Bechtel]

--I have a question! I visited the site and found NO information on how much they cost or where to order them... Where can I get a 20GB model for my laptop??

You mean DOSboot =30 sec and startOO = 30 sec on your PCs? Wow! What exactly is a solid state machine? Can I have one please?

Regards,

You will have to build one yourself. All you need is an appropriate mini-ITX or mini-ATX case and motherboard, one of these solid state hard drives: http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php
768 MB RAM, passive cooling and a fanless power supply. No moving parts. Yeah, it is pretty darned speedy.

[monkeyman]

20 GB? Whoa! I don't think so. They are deadly expensive. I got a SimpleTech 1.8 GB which is a rebranded Bitmicro for $1,139.61 U.S.
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.asp?EDC=450930

I partitioned it 1GB FAT32 for the boot up and ROM and 720MB for Persistant Home. Storage is a share on a Win2K server.

Oh, I should mention that I built three boxes and sold two to off-set the cost.

[garyng]

Can I use off-the-shelf CF card and a say USB 2.0 enclosure to somewhat 'lower' the cost ? 512M CF is relatively cheap.

[monkeyman]

I'm afraid compact flash isn't bootable. You could mount the ROM on it and boot by an ide drive I suppose. I'm only guessing here. I wouldn't be surprised if that has been discussed in the Hardware forum at some point.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

ARG, way too pricey for me! Sounds cool though. You wouldn't want to donate one to a school would you?

Just kidding.

Sort of.

Regards,

[Henk Poley]

I know that smaller flash chip == cheaper, so...

A bit off topic, but you might be able to use PXES (mentioned somewhere on this forum), remastered with an openMosix kernel? PXES is only 5MB, though you could off coarse boot it using PXE (network boot). Don't think the server is going to be quite happy with ~25 thin-clients. openMosix won't help you that much, since all I/O needs to go though the server.

I don't know what purpose you wanted to use Flash for booting? Speed? I think using a dedicated Knoppix PXE server with loads of RAM (so it can cache everything) would help more. And that would be pretty cheapo compared to 25x ~1000 EUR for the Flash drives. btw, since you better not put the swap on a Flash drive (writes wear the memory), you would probably need lots of RAM on each machine already.

[monkeyman]

ARG, way too pricey for me! Sounds cool though. You wouldn't want to donate one to a school would you?

Just kidding.

Sort of.

Regards,

Yeah, normally way too pricey for me too. Geeze, you can buy a kick-ass computer for that kind of money. But, I was tasked with comming up with two absolutely silent pcs for a client running a custom QNX RTOS , so I made enough to get a drive for myself. Otherwise, forget it.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

j.drake, you may want to look at this too!

Good Luck,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, I got sick of this machine that came preinstalled with WINXP and NTFS. So, I reinstalled WINXP on VFAT32.

Now, not only can I place the compressed KNOPPIX file on c:\KNOPPIX, but its really easy to make a DOS Boot Disk! Just go to My Computer and right click on the floppy. Then if you click on format there's a choice for formatting a boot floppy! All you have to do is add the autoexec.bat file.

Works like a charm!

Regards,

[jdong]

the DriveSpace driver. Used to access compressed disks. If you don't have any, feel free to delete.

P.S. I find a 'boot key' quicker.


(1) Install LILO into the boot sector of some other partition (NOT THE MBR.) This will create a 'hidden' bootsector, not a dual-boot.

(2) Insert in a floppy disk (formatted, unformatted, empty, full, WHO CARES!).

(3) Open up a cmd line, become root.

(4) Issue

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

Replace /dev/hda2 with your knoppix partition. This copies the first 512 bytes of hda2 (the bootsector) into the first 512 bytes of your floppy.

(5) Boot with the floppy. You'll see that it's almost INSTANT. Why? Your DOS boot disk is almost 1/2 a MB. This floppy is half of a KB!