Booting xp from USB key

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bobdole369

Gawd
Joined
Jun 27, 2004
Messages
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I'm doing the ultimate boot CD from a USB key, anyone gone so far as to put xp and have a disk free workstation? Any links or help? I'd like to be able to R&D this avenue as we put computers aboard ships (actually mega and super yachts) and marine life is pretty hostile to spinning disks, yet SSD's aren't quite affordable or proven.

Our software rarely writes to disk and we have enough memory to minimize paging, so an entire OS/software on a USB key is not out of the question.

I know about the IDE -> CF devices and I've actually used a few of them (fusion research media clients).
 
I've only heard of installing XP from USB, not actually running. Can you use a Linux distribution, perhaps. I know several of those will run from a flash key.
 
The performance off the drive would be nearly unusable. You can load a live version of Ubuntu 8.10 that runs off the drive, but you wouldn't want to try Windows.
 
I thought about doing a booting/running xp off a usb drive as well, look everywhere but couldn't find any information about it. I think it's impossible to do given how XP is designed. Like the other posters you should look into using a Linux distro that can run off a usb drive.
 
holy god i remember trying to install windows from a thumbdrive...what a nightmare...not one tutorial i found worked. 3rd time a computer made me cry.
 
You could look into Windows XP Embedded (or Windows Embedded Standard as it's known now). Booting from a USB flash drive is one of the major features introduced in the previous iteration of the OS. Performance is up to the read/write speeds of the drive you use, and proper motherboard bios support. Won't be as fast as a hard drive, but still reasonable and usable.
 
I've run XP and XPe from flash and I have to say... it's sloooooooooow. But it works.
 
Speed isn't critical. It runs an app that uses maybe 100MB RAM and relies heavily on the NIC and CPU. Just a thought, I'll look a bit into Windows Embedded, but it seems like there would be some serious software engineering there.
 
To be honest it is going to depend on your application and what you use the equipment for.

If you must use a thumb drive windows solution then Windows Embedded would be the way to go IMO.

SSD's are the way to go for storage but again depending on your application they can be very expensive especially is you are looking to at least keep performance in line with that of a standard hard drive.

Now as for SSD's being a proven technology I am not sure what you think they have to prove? I know what they need to improve and that is the cost. But at the same time thumb drives have been proven unsuitable as windows boot media with few exceptions.

You really don't get in to detail about your application but using a CF card or thumb drive just because SSD has a price premium seems rather silly on such expensive ships. Especially if these computers are meant for personal interaction and not just monitoring and controlling equipment on the ship.
 
In my experience boot times can be kept under 2 minutes, and read performance will be the most important toward usability. Booting from any flash media you'd want to use the write filter to protect it against unneeded writes, once the os and your app is loaded in memory the only noticeable hiccups will be if it has to go back to the disk for anything. As long as you can keep writes to the disk to a minimum you'll hardly notice the hit.
 
bobdole369 said:
I'm doing the ultimate boot CD from a USB key, anyone gone so far as to put xp and have a disk free workstation? Any links or help? I'd like to be able to R&D this avenue as we put computers aboard ships (actually mega and super yachts) and marine life is pretty hostile to spinning disks, yet SSD's aren't quite affordable or proven.

Our software rarely writes to disk and we have enough memory to minimize paging, so an entire OS/software on a USB key is not out of the question.

I know about the IDE -> CF devices and I've actually used a few of them (fusion research media clients).
Click to expand...

I tried it about a year ago so I know It's possible. I searched a lot of tutorials and after a ton of work finally made it work. But now that SSDs are droping in price its not worth the trouble.

As TGA pointed out, there are several SSDs for under $100 bucks which are bigger and much faster than any USB key.
 
OK I'm sold on SSD's. Gonna need to find some docs on reliability vs. hard drives to sell my boss, and he's gonna have to sell to the class societies who assume that a PC has a spinning disk that is bound to fail, but I'm willing to take the plunge and build a machine just to see it work.
 
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