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

[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.

I LOVE GOOGLE.

[sekzscripting]

http://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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.