USB booting :: booting from usb stick @ pcmcia usb hub



i thought you didn't have a floppy drive ?
i still don't have a floppy ;)
but i built bootable cd's, so i thought to take the pcmcia floppys as a sample.

i didn't had the time to tinker with that old notebook ...
but i will later.


thanks for all help!

phew i think i get myself a compact flash to ide adapter and use this as harddrive. ;)
ok,
i now have a compact flash card and a cf to ide adapter ...

i bought a good cf-card, 1gb in size, 120x ...
i made an harddrive install on it and its damn fast and silent!

... very well! ... perfect! ... i thought ... but i was wrong!

because now i know that the cf-cards do wear out after an specific amount of read-write cycles ...
:(

especially swapping will wear it out fast.

so how to reduce the read and write cycles?

the solutions i am thinking about:

a: leave the harddrive install as is and see how long it will last (hmm ... anybody eyperience with that?)

b: leave the harddrive install but swap on an usb stick

c: frugal install - i do not think this will reduce the read/write cycles, because it is mounted from the cf and not from ram.
also a frugal install is very slow!

d: toram install - much too less ram! just 96mb! nogo

e: use the cf card as booting device and run the whole system from an usb stick plugged into the pcmcia usb-adapter.
that solution will reduce the load on the cf card to a minimum, but then i am where i startet! (and i still do not have a clue how to alter the usb or pcmcia boot floppys to load both drivers)


your opinions??


thanks in advance!

i vote for solution (a) cos' i've just bought a cf+ide_adapter and i want to know how they can last too!

The difference is I bought the cheapest brand I could
find (TwinMOS) so I don't mind abusing it. I did a frugal install and do notice it is sluggish on loading and using uci s. It says 140x but I really don't believe it.
I am thinking about using 'noatime' in fstab, it's supposed to reduce disk access for  time stamping (i think).

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