Anyone here successfully used a usb stick in place of a hd?

[Purrrfect]

I've read a couple sites about it, tried to do it with one of my sticks but had issues with the bartpe tool making the image on the flash stick and haven't revisited it. I'm interested in trying to find a similar solution for a laptop as the particular application I have is not very moving parts friendly.

[Kryssan]

I've read a couple sites about it, tried to do it with one of my sticks but had issues with the bartpe tool making the image on the flash stick and haven't revisited it. I'm interested in trying to find a similar solution for a laptop as the particular application I have is not very moving parts friendly.

At least a dozen flavours of *nix that do this. What're you particularly looking for?

[Purrrfect]

Needs to run windows. I was just seeing if anyone has done it successfully using windows. I have some other sticks I can try, just haven't gotten around to it.

[Kaisha]

Main problem I'd see with Windows is fitting all the generic drivers into it, and not having it bitch about a major hardware change on every new PC you boot it up on, requiring you to re-register your serial. Would need a few cracks to bypass all the headaches.

[Kryssan]

Microsoft is entertaining offering Windows 7 on a USB device... we'll see where that goes. At this point not a lot of information about it.



However, for other flavors of Windows, especially XP, all you really need is Google and some time. Plenty of topics about how to run XP on a flash drive. You'll have to sift through all the topics about just booting from a USB drive/installing from a USB drive, but I found at least 4 that discussed how to go about setting up an environment on a USB drive, including things like registry changes/etc you would probably have to do in order to get it running.


Things you will run into: You can't do it through a hub (IE the drive must be plugged directly into the computer, not through an external USB hub expander), some flash drives will not function properly, some motherboards don't fully support it, etc.


Its not an exact science, a lot of finagling and testing will be required on your part to find out what will and what won't work for your system; and it also depends on what applications you're trying to load off it. Its not as pretty a process as *nix, but yes, it can be done.

[fishstix]

I have successfully done it before, using bartpe and a slim version of winxp I think. They might've called it WinPE cant remember was years ago D: It boot and was able to do some file work when I was inbetween installs. Had a really small file size but can't remember either... sorry I'm not much help but it can be done lol

[bungiefan]

Digg had a link for someone installing XP to a 128 MB USB flash drive when I was in trade school in 2005. They did it without a pagefile and it took a long time to boot, but they did it.