Is it possible to boot from a flash memory disk connected to a USB
port? It is assumed that the flash disk is formatted as a boot disk.


--

"A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
It keeps him upright."
-Robert Heinlein

Hi, I think this is possible with some motherboards. It just depends if
your BIOS allows it. open up your bios screen and have a poke about or
look in the user manual for your motherboard.

"Bob" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Is it possible to boot from a flash memory disk connected to a USB
> port? It is assumed that the flash disk is formatted as a boot disk.
>

I got my Dell to boot from the flash drive.

1. Make it bootable. There are several utilities that will do it.
2. Make sure your machine is set up to boot from the drive before your hard
drive.
3. I had to disable booting from my internal card reader before it would
boot from a flash drive. This was the tricky part for me.

After that it was no problem.

Peter

On Tue, 16 May 2006 15:31:42 GMT, (E-Mail Removed) (Bob) wrote:

>Is it possible to boot from a flash memory disk connected to a USB
>port? It is assumed that the flash disk is formatted as a boot disk.


Yes

Flash Thumbdrives, even SD cards in memory readers can be
booted, providing the motherboard properly supports this...
which many do, and even more claim to, but finding out if
your board actually can boot from any particular USB device
is something you may have to try to be certain of, unless
you find someone with exact same combo of parts that has
demonstrated they work.

The more foolproof way to do it is to use a compactflash
card and CF-IDE adapter. That will work with just about any
motherboard because compactflash was made to work in ATA
mode. Many if not most CF cards may use PIO mode instead of
UDMA though, which is slower and uses more CPU time. I
believe Sandisk's higher-end cards are UDMA capable
(probably others now too but you'd need to see that as a
feature of the card to be sure), yet an UDMA supportive
CF-IDE adapter must also be used.

It depends on what you want to boot too. Flash drives may
have a removable media descriptor that changes how windows
handles them. Certain IDE drivers may not work with them
(for example, when I had a thumbdrive booting Win2k, it
wouldn't boot (finish booting) if the nVidia nForce2 IDE
driver was installed instead of the MS IDE driver. DOS is
dumber though, no such issues there.

It depends on the particular motherboard's settable BIOS settings.

--
DaveW

----------------
"Bob" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Is it possible to boot from a flash memory disk connected to a USB
> port? It is assumed that the flash disk is formatted as a boot disk.
>
>
> --
>
> "A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
> It keeps him upright."
> -Robert Heinlein

On Tue, 16 May 2006 16:52:56 -0400, kony <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>The more foolproof way to do it is to use a compactflash
>card and CF-IDE adapter. That will work with just about any
>motherboard because compactflash was made to work in ATA
>mode. Many if not most CF cards may use PIO mode instead of
>UDMA though, which is slower and uses more CPU time. I
>believe Sandisk's higher-end cards are UDMA capable
>(probably others now too but you'd need to see that as a
>feature of the card to be sure), yet an UDMA supportive
>CF-IDE adapter must also be used.

Will this mode preserve the fast characteristics of flash memory that
you realize on USB?

>It depends on what you want to boot too. Flash drives may
>have a removable media descriptor that changes how windows
>handles them. Certain IDE drivers may not work with them
>(for example, when I had a thumbdrive booting Win2k, it
>wouldn't boot (finish booting) if the nVidia nForce2 IDE
>driver was installed instead of the MS IDE driver. DOS is
>dumber though, no such issues there.

I am just thinking about my next machine which is a ways off. I would
like to use non-volatile memory for the two main disks in my setup -
the boot disk and the backup disk. I will periodically clone these to
hard drives for archive purposes.

I believe flash memory is coming down in price such that you could use
a 32GB flash drive. I keep my drives very clean - no more than 15GB on
the two mentioned above. Therefore when 32GB flash memory comes down
to $100 per stick, I might want to give it a try. By then I am sure I
can find an appropriate mainboard. However if CF-IDE is as fast or
faster than USB, or is better overall, then that would be the way to
go.


--

"A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
It keeps him upright."
-Robert Heinlein

On Tue, 16 May 2006 16:01:57 -0700, "DaveW" <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>It depends on the particular motherboard's settable BIOS settings.

I will have to borrow my son's flash stick, format it as a boot drive
and see if my BIOS will support it.

But that is moot because if I ever used flash disks I would build a
new machine around it.


--

"A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
It keeps him upright."
-Robert Heinlein

On Wed, 17 May 2006 15:22:59 GMT, (E-Mail Removed) (Bob) wrote:

>On Tue, 16 May 2006 16:52:56 -0400, kony <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>>The more foolproof way to do it is to use a compactflash
>>card and CF-IDE adapter. That will work with just about any
>>motherboard because compactflash was made to work in ATA
>>mode. Many if not most CF cards may use PIO mode instead of
>>UDMA though, which is slower and uses more CPU time. I
>>believe Sandisk's higher-end cards are UDMA capable
>>(probably others now too but you'd need to see that as a
>>feature of the card to be sure), yet an UDMA supportive
>>CF-IDE adapter must also be used.
>
>Will this mode preserve the fast characteristics of flash memory that
>you realize on USB?

It still has low latency, "seek" time. PIO mode will be
slower than USB2 if the system's USB2, and the flash disk's
supportive USB2 bridge chip, are good. Some are better than
others, and none are particularly good at USB2 with many
small files which is ironic since that is exactly where
flash memory's low latency should really shine.

CF using UDMA should be better than USB2, but I don't have
any of the newest/fastest CF cards on a UDMA capable adapter
so it is only theoretical.



>
>>It depends on what you want to boot too. Flash drives may
>>have a removable media descriptor that changes how windows
>>handles them. Certain IDE drivers may not work with them
>>(for example, when I had a thumbdrive booting Win2k, it
>>wouldn't boot (finish booting) if the nVidia nForce2 IDE
>>driver was installed instead of the MS IDE driver. DOS is
>>dumber though, no such issues there.
>
>I am just thinking about my next machine which is a ways off. I would
>like to use non-volatile memory for the two main disks in my setup -
>the boot disk and the backup disk. I will periodically clone these to
>hard drives for archive purposes.

One of the problems with flash for the OS is what OS we
often use, Windows. Windows incessantly writes to the drive
even if the swap file is turned off or delegated to a
ramdisk. Other applications have an annoying tendency to do
so too until one manually disables certain features (if it
is possible to do so). For example TV tuner cards, the
moment you load up the application it may then be writing to
the HDD every X # of seconds to support a replay feature.
Other apps may write less often but still quite a bit, like
editing applications with undo features.

I am wondering why you would use the flash for the main
drives then "periodically clone these to hard drives for
archive purposes". It seems at least as useful to do it the
other way around, use the hard drives for the OS and clone
the important data to the more reliable but more limited
write cycle storage, the flash memory.



>
>I believe flash memory is coming down in price such that you could use
>a 32GB flash drive. I keep my drives very clean - no more than 15GB on
>the two mentioned above. Therefore when 32GB flash memory comes down
>to $100 per stick, I might want to give it a try. By then I am sure I
>can find an appropriate mainboard. However if CF-IDE is as fast or
>faster than USB, or is better overall, then that would be the way to
>go.

If considering speed then you will have to see benchmarks of
the particular product you are considering, to make a good
choice. Performance can vary considerably with the flash
drive or CF cards themselves, though a CF-IDE adapter (one
that supports UDMA) is a fixed entity, only a pin-adapter
that will be no faster or slower whether you picked up a
generic on ebay or something more expensive from a US
company... the latter would probably cost about 4X as much.

On Wed, 17 May 2006 15:24:15 GMT, (E-Mail Removed) (Bob) wrote:

>On Tue, 16 May 2006 16:01:57 -0700, "DaveW" <(E-Mail Removed)>
>wrote:
>
>>It depends on the particular motherboard's settable BIOS settings.
>
>I will have to borrow my son's flash stick, format it as a boot drive
>and see if my BIOS will support it.
>
>But that is moot because if I ever used flash disks I would build a
>new machine around it.


New as-in modern (at that time), thus tending to be faster
than what you're using now, or not?

I find flash to be more appropriate for aging systems, since
flash is still slower than a hard drive it is less of a
bottleneck to a new system to use a mechanical hard drive,
then the older less used system which will tend to have
fewer I/O to the drives since it is in a secondary or
tertiary role to the main system... and I can only assume
you would want to use the newer, faster, system for your
main use system.

On Wed, 17 May 2006 16:14:10 -0400, kony <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I am wondering why you would use the flash for the main
>drives then "periodically clone these to hard drives for
>archive purposes".

The reason for the archive to HDD is obvious. I do not want to lose
the data.

I am thinking out loud. I do not know why I would want to use flash
disks other than it is relatively new technology and it is purportedly
faster than HDDs.

>It seems at least as useful to do it the
>other way around, use the hard drives for the OS and clone
>the important data to the more reliable but more limited
>write cycle storage, the flash memory.

I would use flash disks for both the OS and the online backup disk -
and periodically clone both to HHDs for archive purposes.

>If considering speed then you will have to see benchmarks of
>the particular product you are considering, to make a good
>choice. Performance can vary considerably with the flash
>drive or CF cards themselves, though a CF-IDE adapter (one
>that supports UDMA) is a fixed entity, only a pin-adapter
>that will be no faster or slower whether you picked up a
>generic on ebay or something more expensive from a US
>company... the latter would probably cost about 4X as much.

It sounds like I am a bit early with this.



--

"A politician's neck should always have a noose around it.
It keeps him upright."
-Robert Heinlein