Linux Laptop w/ 3.5" Disk, USB, and No Hard Drive?

ryewell asks: "I have an IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive being the most important stats I would assume for this question. So my hard drive died, and I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.Would it be possible to boot the laptop in Linux using a 3.5 disk, then using drivers access the USB memory stick that had an adequate Linux system on it?" With USB thumb drives getting to be as large as 512 megs, memory sticks weighing in at 1 gig, and Compact Flash cards getting into the 2 gig range, this might not be such a bad idea. There's the Linux Mobile System that looks to implement something like this, but are there other distributions or similar projects that might be of interest? If you were going to put together a custom system for something like this, how would you do it? "If Linux can be configured this way, I would need no hard drive, and the created docs/info could be saved on the USB drive memory stick. This way, no hard drive means no moving parts, which means better battery life, and I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US after taxes, shipping, etc. And how cool would it be to run a laptop off of a memory stick! Unfortunately, I know nothing about Linux, but this might be a cool problem to solve for those smart and knowledgeable enough to figure it out. Thanks for any help you can provide!"

Comments

I would not use MemoryStick

[YankeeInExile]

I would use a CF card and ATA adapter.

I would also keep in mind that write times for CF devices can be ...g...l...a...c...i...a...l compared to disk.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Smallpond]

Look into a flash file system to minimize writes to flash and to deal with inevitable bad blocks.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

CF cards have limited numbers of erase/write cycles (usually about 300,000), so using it with swap files and other frequently written applications would be inadvisable, unless the user is planning on boosting the amount of RAM and/or turning off swap.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[hoggoth]

> I'd replace the dead HD for about $15

Reading, not your strong point.
From the article:
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[stevenbdjr]

Searching for a deal, not the posters strong point.

I just recently bought a new 20GB laptop drive, 5400rpm, for $80. If you look on eBay, you can find them in the 2 - 4GB range for around $15 - $30.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Richard_at_work]

Depends how much space he wants, i have a spare 2GB (or 4GB, cant remember) 2.5" hard disk going spare atm. Yes, new ones are going to set you back $130 (for 30GB i bet) but since hes looking at much lower capacities in his 'alternative' method of operation, why would he turn his nose up at 2gb second hand.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[Anonymous Coward]

And set the noatime option on all the filesystems, to avoid a write every time the drive is accessed.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[cbreaker]

That Thinkpad should work find with a standard size low profile notebook HD.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[croddy]

well, surely he might get more *minutes* of battery life, but I can't imagine him being as *productive* while waiting for his programs to load, memory pages to swap, and files to save ... all over a blistering USB 1.1 bus to a screamin' compactflash disk.

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[zonker]

also keeping in mind the limited number of rewrites that flash memory has. it is amazingly high, but if you are using it day in day out you might hit the threshold...

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[mp3phish]

Well...

Since CF Cards are pin compatible with IDE hard drives, and CF cards are currently the most durable (and cheapest) flash memory (even below USB Memory) I would put a CF card in the hard drive slot of the laptop...

The only problem is that flash memory is no good at writing (very slow) and so turn off swap and try to minimize writes to the disk (ie, don't run too many cron's etc..)

I think it is a waste of time and money to try to boot off floppy, and then load a system off a USB flash drive or CF card, because even with a 1GIG USB drive (or CF card) you will be paying about the same as a low end brand new hard drive for your laptop, and have very very slow performance, no swap, and limited life (600,000 writes per sector or something for flash memory is what i read somewhere)

So your salvage operation as you describe it sounds like it is going to cost you more, and give less performance, than a brand new hard drive with 1yr warranty slapped into there. Pricewatch has some new ones for pretty cheap. Even newegg.com has them for less than 100$ (and the cheapest 1GIG usb memory stick i have found is about 130$)

Your idea sounds good, and similar ideas have been done before in the linux firmware hacked routers.. where there is a very small amount of flash memory onboard but using a USB memory stick to load the rest of the system. But in your case, this isn't practical because its cheaper to go with a hard drive than a flash stick.

my 2c

Re:I would not use MemoryStick

[VivianC]

The old Thinkpads use standard 2.5 inch hard driver, but require a special caddy. If you still have the broken hard drive, you still have the required caddy.

I LOVE GOOGLE.

[sekzscripting]

http://www.toms.net/rb/

Re:I LOVE GOOGLE.

[Edward Teach]

Too bad you don't know enough about HTML to make a link... www.toms.net/rb/

Small Linux

[homeobocks]

Small Linux should have everything you need, on two floppies, to mount a USB filesystem. If not, it is simply the matter of compiling a kernel and sticking it on one of the floppies. Good luck with your project!

damn

[l33t m4st3r]

damn small linux. there is a way to boot it off of a usb memory pen. there is a how-to on the page i think. i have done it before and it was the best thing ever.

Re:damn

[Em Adespoton]

Flonix is based on DSL -- this is a custom USB edition that is quite nice :)

Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb card

[jomas1]

PUPPY Linux http://www.goosee.com/puppy/flash-puppy.htm
allows you to boot off a usb card and does not require a hard drive. Damn small linux and dynebolic are two other distros that work well with underpowered hardware and don't require harddrives but they both require cd drives.

There is a more practical solution

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Solutions for pennies.

Limited lifespan

[PCM2]

As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan. It wears out after a certain number of erase/write cycles. That actual number is probably in the hundreds of thousands, but if you've got a Linux swap partition on there you'll be pounding the silicon pretty hard. Add to that a floppy disc as your boot partition, and ... well ... this sounds like one of the more head-scratchingly silly ideas I've heard in a while.

Re:Limited lifespan

[Alan Hicks]

As other people are constantly pointing out whenever somebody posts an idea like this, "non-volatile" memory like MemorySticks and CompactFlash has a limited lifespan.

Correct, and that is the main limitation of such devices. Just off the top of my head here, I can come up with an idea that just might work, but the OP had better be damn well prepared to use a very lightweight distro.

Step 1: Partition that USB drive. You're going to need a very small / partition, and a much larger /usr partition. These are not to be messed with. You'll also need a /home-flash partition large enough for your personal use, and of course, a backup plan for when that drive fails.
Step 2: Build your kernel. This can be tricky. Building a kernel that accesses the USB drive can't be that difficult, but you'll also need initrd support. Why? Well, because you've got 128 MB of RAM, and you certainly don't want to write to that flash drive all the time. Make a small, perhaps 32 MB initrd and mount it at /var. You can modify your init scripts to populate this directory safely. Symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, and now you've cut down a lot of your writes to your flash device.
Step 3: Make yourself another 32MB initrd and mount it a /home. Again, your init scripts can safely populate this with all your dot-files. Anything you definately want to save must be manually copied to the /home-flash partition. Optionally you can take a look at the scripts included with Slax. One script (IIRC configsave) will make a tar.gz of all those pertinant files and save them to a partition on a USB flash drive.

It should be noted that I don't know if the linux kernel can make and support multiple RAM drives at once. If not, just make one RAM drive, mount it a /var, and make /home a symlink to /var/home.

Flash hard drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with a USB memory stick when you get can CF card->IDE adaptors? Here's one outfit that sells an adaptor that works for desktop computers.

I'm sure adaptors for laptop drives exist. If not, one could easily be built--it's a simple matter of changing the connector type, because CF cards have a built in IDE compatible interface!

Re:good point

[josepha48]

I'd actually do a Linux boot disk, there are several Linux 1 floppy distros around, and even howto's on the subject, at tldp.org.

In most cases it is easier to do if you already have a linux box to work with.

A really good place to start with would be http://www.8ung.at/spblinux/

Apparently this guy is using XDirectFB and a couple of floppies and you can have a full X running to surf the web. He has a USB versino somewhere on the site. In fact check out his usbboot setup.

Cake

[Apreche]

It's a piece of cake. I've got a board at work running Linux (not uClinux, real linux) with the entire file system in flash. It has no moving parts and works great. Just build a kernel with support for the USB drive. In your fstab mount this drive as /. Follow the linux from scratch instructions to build the smallest system possible. You'll probably want to use busybox to the maximum.

Also when building the kernel try to minimize the number of modules you build. Build things into the bzimage if you have the option. But at the same time only include the bare minimum things necessary.

Lastly when you are building things with gcc be sure to use Os to optimize for size.

Since its an x86 system if the USB drive is supported by the kernel this shouldn't be difficult at all.

What about ZipSlack

[Open_Matrix42]

Being a big slackware fan I have to mention ZipSlack. I'm not sure what it would take to get that to boot from a usb memory stick but I can't imagine it being very hard. Link

I use a CF adapter in my notebook.

[Cybersonic]

I have an older 400mhz Dell notebook. I am currently using a CF to IDE adapter in it.

http://store.ituner.com/ituner/emstcfl.html

It works great, i am using a 256 meg sandisk compact flash card and feather linux.

http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

Overall the performance is not too bad. Battery life is MUCH better without the hard drive. Write speed is not too great, but since I usually ssh into my server and leech from there, i dont need to worry about that much... :)

it's possible

[Da_Slayer]

There have been many projects over the years to run Linux on just one floppy disc and within other very tight space/memory requirements.

Some examples of Linux distros that do this are:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/byld
http:/ /www.fdlinux.com/

But I really think you are looking for this:
http://linuxmobile.sourceforge.net/

Linux Mobile System (LMS) is a full Linux system whose support is the new USB Flash Memory Drives. The intention is to boot any PC with USB support with our system and therefore we will have every administration and analysis applications that we have selected, so we will not need install it. This way, always we will be able to get our Linux system ready to use in our pocket.

Now if you cannot boot the laptop with the USB connection I am sure you can use a mini/micro distrobution to boot the system with USB support and then have it read and run off the USB drive.

I hope this information is helpful in your quest. =P

Look at the different Linux Thin Clients

[woobieman29]

Google is your friend. Check out The Linux Bootable USB Key HOWTO . Particularly the piece about the Flonix Knoppix variant.

Re:Why Bother?

[hdw]

I've got some 233MHz laptops that works just like wonder.
One is dead silent, always on, network monitor (running tkined/scotty).
Another is my SMS/Voice gateway.
A third (which is actually a P90) is my wireless Mud client.

So don't say that slow old laptops are useless, just because you can't play the lastest games on 'em.
//hdw

look harder?

[Loie]

from a little Googling, it looks like your IBM Thinkpad 390 will accept a standard issue 4200RPM hard drive, which I'm finding for much less than $130 USD. Newegg.com has a 20GB Toshiba drive for less than $80 USD. Also, it looks like 512MB flash drives run for about $70... running linux w/o a hard drive has a 'cool' factor, sure, but i'd rather have about 40 times the storage space for a few dollars more.

not worth it

[whowho]

unless you are going in for the science value of it.

consider:
- your time
- the cost of USB/CF sticks
- the usability of the setup (slow)

all of it would add up to more than the $130 or whatever for the HD.

it would be just a case of hacking up your own custom kernel and mounting the USB stick.

I do this... occasionally

[kunudo]

I have a ton of computers, like alot of others here, I suppose. Now, my newest Athlon XP system is really noisy, but an old pentiumIII I have is really silent. So I boot Feather Linux on it from my 128meg twinmos pendrive. It can't boot from USB though, but there's a bootdisk on the Feather Linux website that enables this. It's nice for that size(60 MB I think), and has 2 word processors(!)(why), a web browser, pdf support, nmap, and lots more. And it's real easy to add modules to too. Give it a try.

RUNT!

[Kyosuke77]

I saw this and I immediately thought of RUNT!

It's an adaptation of ZipSlack designed to run off a USB memory key. Usually it needs the aid of a boot floppy to get things rolling, but theoretically it can be booted off the memory key alone on systems that support it. Few systems support USB booting properly, though, so I think you'll find you need the floppy.

Admittedly, it is designed for testing a machine's network connection more than anything, but it still has a fairly complete set of packages (basically anything ZipSlack has). If you want to customize, you can just trade off some of the packages in RUNT for the ones you want, or you can get ZipSlack and go from scratch. Using RUNT would be easier, though, since it's already properly configured for using the USB key.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[john.mull]

IBM is pretty good about keeping their BIOS updates uptodate. It would definitely be worth a try.

Regarding running Linux off Memory Cards

[eyefish]

A couple of things to keep in mind with Memory Cards:

1. Memory Cards usually have a "number of write times" which is sometimes around 100,000 writes. This is much more than enough when you're using the card for saving photos, and a card could probably last you a lifetime for this purpose. However, when you put an operating system with a swap filesystem on it, which reads/writes tons of times constantly, 100,000 becomes very restrictive and you could easily damage the card in a month or so depending on ussage. NOTE however that not all cards are created equal, so do some research on this. Try searching for MTBF (mean time between failures) along with the type of card you're planning on using on google.

2. Although it is true many flash cards are slow compared to hard drives, some can be as fast or faster (depending on your system). For example, the SanDisk Ultra II CF cards have a *minimum* sustained write speed of 9 MB/s (that's MegaBytes per second, or aprox. 72 Megabits per second) which is VERY fast (however I do not know its MTBF specs). You can get such a 1GB card for about US$220. However, nowdays it is still MUCH cheaper to buy a hard drive.

The real reason to not want the hard drive

[btempleton]

Is to create totally silent linux boxes out of old laptops for applications where you want this silence. Media servers, living room web browsing station etc.

There are linux distros that will boot and run from CD-rom, but of course they access the noisy cd-rom all the time.

There are network based distros but they go so overboard, they want to get everything from the LAN, which is not so fast and slow to boot up.

In fact, in many cases the hard drive in the laptop is still there, it's just not perfectly silent.

I would like a distro which booted from hard drive (or CD-rom, or floppy) and after loading what it wanted, and mounting network filesystems, shut down the noisy boot device for good, or at least until some unusual activity called for it.

A delimma faced many times

[psyburn]

Oh dear. You don't say that it has a CD-ROM so MandrakeMove, Knoppix, and PHLAK are all out of the question. *sigh*
And they are so easy to use too... :'(
Oh well.....A USB-CDROM boot option in the BIOS looks promising.

It's actually a stolen thinkpad

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster has come upon a stolen thinkpad, or a thinkpad where the built in boot password has been lost. Without the password, the BIOS won't boot the drive.

That password is stored in an eeprom in the TP, and is also pushed into firmware on (many) IBM-qualified drives. So, you cant take a stolen drive and boot it either without that drives password in additon to any local boot password.

That is also why the poster doesn't just go out and buy a used drive for $15 off of ebay and slap it in... the drive would still be 'broken'.

So, the poster is hoping that we'll provide them with an alternative to make the thinkpad useable.

The answer is to use knoppix on a usb drive and be done with it.

microdrives etc

[EvilAlien]

How about this? Faster than glacial, at least.

MPIO HS100 1.5GB HDD Portable Storage

Plug and play! Carry large data wherever you go. HS100 is a moderately priced mobile digital audio and video consumer product from Digitalway. HS100 is a 1.5 GB portable USB Mass Storage installed with 1-inch HDD. It is a combination of huge capacity HDD and small flash memory storage device. It is capable of fast data transmission by using the USB 2.0 Interface.

Here's an actual useful answer for your query

[nmoog]

I hope you recheck this posts to get this, because wow what a shit response you got from slashdotters! I have been trying to do the same thing for the last week or so and have found some good resources. Wierd that all the slashdotters say is "get hard drive". Yeah, thanks for that one!

One of the best resources I've found so far is over at damnsmalllinux.org (in the forum, here they have a pretty good how-to on this. I also found a really good discussion of it in the Gentoo forums somewhere, but I forgot to sync my firefox bookmarks today, so I don't have it.

For the project Im working on I can't use a hard drive, but Ive got heaps of memory - so Im just going to use ramdisk for swap space and stuff. That gets around the trashing your key thing. Probably not an option for an old lappy though! Good luck!

Re:Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb car

[SHEENmaster]

BIOS must support booting from USB, which is unlikely in an early Pentium.

Re:Puppy Linux allows you to boot off of a usb car

[nuzoo]

No problem, Puppy Linux also allows you to boot off of a floppy, then run everything from the USB flash drive.

Re:Junk on ebay

[Halfbaked Plan]

I've had excellent luck with small 2.5" hard drives on eBay. I maintain a small collection of older 486 laptops and a 2 gig drive is perfect for such a machine.

I use a Toshiba 486-100 machine with a wireless card in it to browse the web away from the machine room, i.e. on the back porch. It's a good little system.

Another one...

[SilentT]

Another similar distro is Feather Linux. And for the google-challenged, here are the links to damn small linux and dynebolic: DSL, dynebolic.

Re:Probably Knoppix

[prockcore]

There's another distribution for iOpener that i keep meaning to try called jailbait linux.

I helped put together Jailbait. It's a nice distro, although a little out-dated (uses a test 2.4 kernel). I still have it installed on one of my iOpeners.

It has netscape 4, apache, ssh and mp321. It uses blackbox for WM and busybox for the apps.

It would definitely work as a test distro, and it will fit on even the smallest thumbdrives (it weighs in at 16 megs).

Damn Small Linux...

[smurfnsanta]

DSL has been doing this since at least 0.6.x. See: DSL USB + Floppy ~ 50 Mg and change the /dev/hda3 entries to /dev/sdaX, whatever your USB block device is recognized as. From damnsmalllinux.org, see the save settings to HD, and again use the USB instead. Rather amazing what they include on just 50 megs, and all apps are light weight enough you may actually get some work done.

Re:Junk on ebay

[peragrin]

Funny I bought a used 6 gig drive for $50, and haven't had a problem. Then again I do know someone who did the same and it is toast now, then again this guy also has a tendacy to throw the laptop across the room when windows hangs.

I would switch him but he ain't smart enough to use Linux, and to cheap to buy a Mac. Nope this guy gets second rate equipment only.

Flash cards have limits and problems

[Anonymous Coward]

You would probably not be reliably able to run a regular distrofrom a flash memory device for a long time. Flash memory has a limit to how many times it can be overwritten. A Linux system has caches and logs and swap files that are written to, and sooner or later the flash device will begin to fail. I am not sure if any systems have been created that cater to running off of a small system with a flash memory device in lieu of an hard disk. Anyway, a hard disk is still cheaper than large flash card devices. Sooner or later you'd have to do a daily fsck to find and mark out bad blocks as memory began to fail in your memory card.

Feather Linux booted off of USB... here's how...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a quick howto on how to setup feather linux to boot off a usb drive (~$130 CAD for 512MB):

http://www.northern.ca/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=1 14

It uses freedos, I imagine if your lappy doesn't support booting from USB (and if freedos has USB drivers) you could boot via a floppy first and then start it up using the above.

So, you don't have to re-write the fs image often

[JSBiff]

I don't see this as being a major problem as long as you are aware of the issue. Seems like it should be possible to put all the system logs, etc, into ram drives. As far as most of the linux system files that you need to load and run apps, they don't need to be written to - just read. Heck, you could maybe partition your flash drive (do memory sticks allow partitioning?) into a read only file-system partition, and a read-write data area for docs and such.

The only hurdle I see to this is that you don't have any swap partition or file. Which is a bit of a drawback, but it should be perfectly possible to run a small linux distro with no swap.

As a case in point - Knoppix loads and runs off a CD - which generally you aren't going to be writing to at all once you've burned the Knoppix image on it. Actually, Knoppix might be an excellent starting point for the person trying to do this - Knoppix devs have already solved a lot of the problems of loading a Linux system from read-only media with no swap.

Actually,

[grepistan]

I've got an even older thinkpad (486, no cdrom) and it gets at least 90 minutes from a charge. Possibly because it is so ancient it draws next to no power, I'm not quite sure.

Because I'm lazy and can't be bothered doing an NFS or HTTP install of some proper linux distro on it, I use basic linux , which is somewhat limited but can do a few basic things. There's a collection of these types of things available here if anyone is interested...

Several Options including Puppy

[billstewart]

Hi, Brad - A couple of people have mentioned small distributions, including Puppy Linux, Feather Linux, Peanut Linux, etc. that can fit on a USB, in most cases a now-obsolete 64KB USB. That should let you boot quickly (better with USB2.0, of course) and have the main applications as well as your LAN going.

Puppy is designed to load itself into RAMdisk and not need to run from the boot media - I don't know for sure if that lets the hard drives or CDROM shut down, but you can probably tweak the Power Management utilities to make that happen. The LiveCD is about 50MB, so it won't take long to download.

RUNT Linux

[kg4eyf]

This is just the sort of thing RUNT Linux is great for. I don't think you can boot directly from USB, so you can boot the RUNT floppy, and it will run Linux off of the USB drive. RUNT is based on the umsdos filesystem, which is great if you want to use the pen drive for other tasks, but if you want to use it just for linux, you can reformat it with ext3 and copy all the files in. RUNT doesn't come with any graphical environments, but you can easily install the appropriate slackware packages to make it complete to your liking. Check it out!

Joel Ebel
http://www.ncsu.edu/resnet/runt

Gentoo LiveStick

[chkn0]

The Gentoo Live Stick

DamnSmall would work out

[Nichotin]

There are several guides out there which shows how to boot DamnSmallLinux from a USB memory stick. The boot process can easily be ported to a floppy, which then reads the rest off the USB stick. DamnSmall is based on knoppix, so any other knoppix based distro should also work out. Example howto (which I followed.): http://www.bootdisk.info/articles.php?action=show& id=13 (you put the boot image on the floppy instead)

Re:Mel?

[1u3hr]

I'm still searching for some good free word processing software for DOS.

Perhaps you'd be interested in MS Word DOS 5.5, which MS is offering freely here. I think it was a Y2K upgrade. Very useful, eg if you want to print on a dot matrix, WinWord just can't use printer fonts, insists on using Truetype, which takes 4 times longer -- just save from WinWord as RTF, open in DOS Word, do some quick search-and replace on fonts, print.

But still, would like to know about "Mel".

Thinkpad Transnote

[prara]

I have a Thinkpad Transnote with no cd drive. The mobo is choosy and won't boot with other cd drives other than the ones designated by IBM. If you have another PC with a cd drive you can actually create an ftp server and install from that server. Or in a LAN network.

Here's a solution

[stevenm86]

I've thrown together a distro based on knoppix and DSL taht boots off a floppy disk and a 128-meg usb drive. THe floppy contains the kernel and some initrd stuff, while the usb key has the rest of the files. It boots off any usb storage device - flash drive, mp3 player, cf reader, etc.Let me know if you want a copy.

Take a look at feather linux

[peterle]

it is based on knoppix; comes with boot disk

feather linux

Re:Mel?

[kristaps.kaupe]

I mailed to author of this arcticle. Mel is acronym from "Multi-Edit Lite" and it can be downloaded from Free DOS software page. Unfortunatelly, it is simple text editor, not a word processor. (and it's shareware, not freeware) :(

As for free DOS word processors, there is thing called "GalaxyWrite". Still working download link are in an old FreeDOS newsitem. It also mentions program called "AsEasyAs" - spreadsheet for DOS. Can't guarrantee anything, as I don't have tested them yet, but I hope this helps for somebody!