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.

Probably Knoppix

[mj01nir]

I run my hacked IA-1 appliance from 16MB Compact Flash using Midori Linux. Sadly, I think the distro is dead now.

Your best bet is to try Knoppix, assuming you have a CD-ROM.

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!

quit being a cheap bastard

[kmcmartin]

and buy a new bloody hard disk. it would be far cheaper to buy a new laptop hard disk, than a 512M of usb storage. christ.

Why boot from floppy?

[john.mull]

If your BIOS will support it, why not remove the floppy from the equation and boot directly from the memory card/key/stick/whatever? A 1 GB key would allow for a Knoppix install and a good bit of data, and then you're word processing with Open Office.

Re:Why boot from floppy?

[vinit79]

If your BIOS will support it, why not remove the floppy from the equation and boot directly from the memory card/key/stick/whatever? A 1 GB key would allow for a Knoppix install and a good bit of data, and then you're word processing with Open Office.

Its a IBM Thinkpad 390 Laptop, PII 266Mhz, 128 MB RAM, with USB 1.0 port and a 3.5 floppy drive.
And u think the bios will support booting of a usb memory stick ????

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.

All you need...

[gnu-sucks]

...is a Debian boot floopy. Custom-compile a kernel that supports your USB or Memory Stick/Compact Flash/Whatever devices, put it on the floppy. Format the external media so that linux can read it (and it may already be able to, so the choice to format may come down to performance).

Make a short script to mount the external media on boot up, and install everything you need from there.

Obviously, having another computer running a BSD or Linux distro will greatly help you achieve this.

Don't be surprised if the fruits of your labor yield a very fast graphical linux box.

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

Re:Why Bother?

[BACbKA]

Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

This is a strange suggestion in a post that advocates cost-saving measures, isn't it? The same laptop can easily be used as a diskless machine booted off the home network, mounting all it needs off the NFS.

Win98

[mekkab]

I've got win98 on a p166 (runs: VPN software, Office 2k, Exceed X station stuff, Photoshop) and win98 on a p233 super-slim laptop (same apps).

Everything runs fine and I'm not even using a stripped down linux (which I'm sure would smoke!).

Give me your old hardware.

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.

Knoppix + Boot Floppy

[nuxx]

I don't know why noone has said this yet, but why not stick a copy of Knoppix in one partition on a large USB keychain device and boot it using a floppy with a boot manager on it? Then use the other partition on the keychain device for data storage.

Booting Knoppix will eliminate the need for massive amounts of read/write, and you'd still have a bit of space to store whatever it is you are working on.

Re:Why Bother?

[Fizzl]

I've been using a DOS boot disk and a program called Mel to do my word processing.

And you suggest trashing his adequate-for-the-purpose machine and buying a top-of-the-line power hog would be saving in some sense.

On the topic of what time costs. I consider my free time absolutely worthless. I waste it on drinking, reading slashdot or watching cartoons anyway. I would find a nice hardware hacking project much more better value for my time than my usual activities.

I made Linux 2.2 (with some basic software) run on 25mhz 486dx with 8 megs of memory just for the challenge of it. Learned hell of a lot of how Linux works in the process too. I say, to the original author: Go for it!
#linux on IRCNet is very helpfull if you show atleast moderate experience so they can actually instruct you without teaching how to use an editor first.

I wonder what this post cost me. Took many minutes to proof read it, and actually check the specs of the old beast in the closet.

How-switch, Multi-OS capability?

[davidsyes]

Is anyone building one of these things as a Proof of Concept? I understand that memory uses more battery juice than the HDD itself.

I think my ideas below and my question above come from my curiosity of how long the portable/hand-held DVD players last. I also wonder how long MP3 device batteries last. Days? Aside from the LCD and CPU chewing up maybe 60% of the battery life, at LEAST the storage and boot and system file devices could be on CF/Smart Media. Maybe someone might want to take the LSB to a new level: Optimizing the installation and locating of system files based on the type of medium to which the OS and user files are being written during install. And, suspend-to-disk, ACPI, and APM problems could be made to go away to a good extent, probably because the disk spinning is eliminated. i am not sure about communicating devices (modems and NICs), tho.

Imagine this:

-- Multi-slot CF/Smart-Media bay
-- O/S Memory sticks/ in each CF/SM bay
-- Energy-efficient/Solar or ambient-light-powered LCD
-- Ability to swap O/S on the fly
-- IR or compatible/comparable input device with own power supply (like the battery-powered Logitech mice...)

Can't laptops go Solid State now? I imagine much of the laptop industry is sustained by momentum to keep cranking out mechanical disks. If an efficient CF/SM platter or storage surface can be optically read by something that is not having to spin at some 7,000 or 10,000 RPM, a lot of other savings might be made.

Also, it seems laptop boards have fewer and fewer soldered components. Further reductions should lead to greater opportunity to bring solid-state laptops to consumer hands. If the OS could be on one the disk, and be swappable, the data on another swappable, disk, then when will a light switch on to make solid-state laptops that hold VMWare or Win4Lin in a Linux environment? VMWare and NeTraverse could then reduce their costs of product just by jumping to distribution/deployment of millions vice 10s of thousands. This would probably devastate ms' foothold, especially of XUL or XML or other code and W3C standards were followed better.

Re:Why Bother?

[damiangerous]

Put the laptop on the driveway and drive over it.

WTF?! I was laid off six months ago, and I haven't found work yet, so as you can imagine money is extremely tight. I don't have a laptop, and I certainly can't afford one, but I'd still love to have something that would let me hang out in the bedroom with my wife and play with Python scripts while watching TV. Before you drive over another older laptop, let me know, I may be within driving distance to come take it off your hands and give it a good home. You seem to have a very different idea of "good enough" than I do.

Junk on ebay

[poptones]

What you will find for $15-$30 (in 2.5" form factor) are absolute junk drives that may or may not be guaranteed to "format in DOS" - which says nothing of what they may do once formatted and you try to put data on them.

I buy lots of laptop stuff on ebay and I rebuild IBM lappys as a hobby. Back when I first started doing this I looked at the price of brand new, fully warranteed drives and decided to just buy a few cheap used ones. Of the three I bought (for a total of more than $100) I have zero functional units less than six months later. The first one (Sony - I should have known) accepted a format and then started clicking a week later, the second (Fujitsu) lasted a couple of months. The genuine IBM drive lasted almost four months before it, too, started clicking one day while at the library - just as I was about to complete a 4GB ISO download.

From then on I buy "expensive" new drives with warranties. Spending $100 on a new drive every couple of years makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $30 every other month on JUNK.

Speaking more directly to the topic, my latest pet is a 500MHz 600 that is being fitted with a custom case and battery pack and internal USB hub and wireless. It will have only one external PCMCIA slot because the other will be permanently occupied by a USB2 card (which will, in turn, talk to the internal wireless USB dongle and USB 10/100 NIC) - but I will be able to refit my machine to a speedy 750MHz or more at my leisure, spare parts are dirt cheap, and I won't have to be a slave to the $60 semi-annual Lithium toss, instead just replacing NiMH cells as they expire.

And the way I'm making room for much of this is by replacing the $80 20GB 2.5" drive with a cool new $110 20GB 1.8" drive. Just a few slight internal adjustments and my one-off geekpad will become the one to rule the world via USB!

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.