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Topic: Can DSL run without a HD

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Locked

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Posts: 2
Joined: July 2006

Posted: July 08 2006,19:09

On my sister's lab top, her hard drive broke, so we took it to get a new hard drive and to reinstall windows. When the new hard drive was in, they couldn't install it at all, so they said the motherboard was also broken. I think they're wrong, so i was wondering if DSL was capable of running without there even being a harddrive in a computer, just to see if theres more than just the harddrive broken.

kerry

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Posts: 706
Joined: April 2006

Posted: July 08 2006,21:26

yes, i run mine totally in ram. my laptop hd gave out a few months back and a new one cost more than the computer is worth. i just leave it on and let the screen go to sleep when not in use and move the mouse or open the top to wake it up, it has been running like that for over 2 months. so if you have enough memory(ram) try the >dsl toram < cheat code to load it to ram. i have 256ram shared which wasn't enough to hold all the app's i wanted to install so i used a old usb key a swap to give me extra room for those extra app's. good luck

Locked

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Posted: July 09 2006,14:06

Thank you for the help, the dsl toram worked and allowed it to load, so now i know only the hard drive was broke.

brianw

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Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: July 09 2006,16:12

Try using DSL to see the hard drive yourself and see what happens. open a terminal and type the following:
sudo fdisk -l
this will list the existing partition table. If there are no partitions you can create one and install windows or DSL (then go back to the people you paid to get it working and say "what's up"). If you get an error it may be the hard drive or the controller on the mother board (ideally one of those 3.5 inch USB enclosures would allow you to test the hardrive).

underdog5004 Offline

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Posts: 45
Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: July 11 2006,22:59

@ Kerry

It may not be a good idea to use a usb penkey as swap...flash memory only has a limited ability for writes before the drive becomes useless...or unwriteable...

-Matthew

5 replies since July 08 2006,19:09

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