Running an OS from a USB flash drive - Corsa Sport - for Vauxhall and Opel Corsa B, Corsa C and Corsa D

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Corsa Sport » Message Board » Off Day » Geek Day » Running an OS from a USB flash drive

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Sam

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Registered: 24th Dec 99
Location: West Midlands
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28th Apr 12 at 14:28

Has anyone here ever done this before?

Does it work well?

Tiger

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Registered: 12th Jun 01
Location: Leicestershire Drives:Astra VXR
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28th Apr 12 at 14:30

I imagine it would be slow it terms of data rate wouldnt it?

John

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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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28th Apr 12 at 14:32

Would be terribly slow.

Tiger

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Registered: 12th Jun 01
Location: Leicestershire Drives:Astra VXR
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28th Apr 12 at 14:34

Isnt Linux the best OS to run from Flash drive?

John

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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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28th Apr 12 at 14:38

Whatever loads the most into RAM will be best.

Aaron

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Registered: 9th Aug 04
Location: Cottingham, East Riding
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28th Apr 12 at 14:45

I've a version of Hirens boot cd (but on a USB pen) which does this. For fixing stuff, it works very well, but i dont think i'd want to do it for every day use.

John

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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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28th Apr 12 at 14:47

If you are talking about the mini XP and mini Linux on Hiren's it loads most of it into RAM.

Sam

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Location: West Midlands
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28th Apr 12 at 14:48

Interesting. Just wondered as I was watching some YouTube videos of people doing this, but yes I suppose USB 2.0 wouldn't be as fast as say IDE/SATA speeds.

Tiger

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Registered: 12th Jun 01
Location: Leicestershire Drives:Astra VXR
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28th Apr 12 at 17:15

Isn't SATA2 about 3gb per second? And USB2 up to 500MB per second?

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Registered: 10th Sep 03
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29th Apr 12 at 17:06

Best arrangement for this sort of thing is to run a VM and save it onto the USB right?

Bart

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Registered: 19th Aug 02
Location: Midsomer Norton, Bristol Avon
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29th Apr 12 at 18:36

I thought alot of OS's are loaded into RAM, so should be very quick, just the OS original files stored on USB/CD, so any personal files would also be stored on USB?
Shouldnt be terribly slow

John

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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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29th Apr 12 at 18:47

If it was that simple you wouldn't need an SSD.

Running off USB is the same, except slower.

Dom

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Registered: 13th Sep 03
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29th Apr 12 at 20:07

Useful for small OS's/Linux Distro's (+ NAS/Media distro's like FreeNas etc), where disk usage is minimal and you don't need swap. Be interesting to see OSX/Windows running from USB and using Ramdisks would be one solution around disk usage and swap/pagefiles.

Give it a whirl Sam and let us know

Ed - You still suffer with I/O performance even if it was VM based. Although it'd be useful to load ESXi from but ideally the virtual disk would be located on physical drives.

Edit - You also have problems with limited disk writes with flash storage.

[Edited on 29-04-2012 by Dom]

Sam

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Registered: 24th Dec 99
Location: West Midlands
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29th Apr 12 at 20:11

I might do a YouTube video of it on my old HP laptop this week with Windows 7 and post up

Got a spare 8GB USB stick so I might try it with that.

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