I have both CompactFlash and SecureDigital. I have a pocket memory device called a Cruzer (from SanDisk) which uses removable SD cards - very nice, that.

I have cables so I can hook this up on demand, as well as multi-card readers that will read both my SD and CF cards (using USB).

I created a floppy disk knoppix.sh that would 1) make /usr/local part of the writable /ramdisk volume, and 2) search for knoppix.sh, knoppix.rb, knoppix.pl, or knoppix.py and run whichever it found. In my case, it is knoppix.rb (a Ruby script) located on the 128M Cruzer device.

This script mounts a couple of ext2 images (located on a FAT volume) and copies the data onto the system - including most of the important user settings, various system settings - and then starts swap automatically (including windows swap files) - then it starts selected servers automatically.

There's no reason that the 128M card has to be FAT formatted; my other 128M card is ext3 formatted - though I had to format it myself.

Only problem so far is that Knoppix won't support the multicard readers because they need the "Scan for all connected LUNs on a SCSI device" option set in the kernel (and it isn't).