Make a bootable Flash drive with Sandisk

loninappleton · 02-05-2006, 03:15 PM

Ever since I saw the Linux journal dream machine I've wanted to make a bootable system using the Sandisk square flash cards.

I've seen the link to HP for making bootable thumb drives.

The goal is to make a silent workstation using the Sandisk as a boot device.

But for now, I'd be satisfied getting an
installable 5.25 card bay reader and boot from that.

Is there nay detailed how to on this?

Info on making a bootable device for Win98SE also helpful.

My current hardware is:

MachSpeed X-caliber mobo
512 mem
Celeron D 2.93 GHz cpu
VIA Bios supporting USB hdd, zip etc.

stress_junkie · 02-06-2006, 08:50 AM

There are links to system building with CF disks at the VIA web site. Look for their nano-itx boards, then look for links from those pages. Addonics makes a bootable CF-IDE drive. These look perfect for use in network appliances where you don't want to burn electricity keeping a disk spinning after the system is running. Firewall, DNS server, router, DHCP server, whatever. These would be great for storing boot code for thin clients too.

loninappleton · 02-06-2006, 03:02 PM

My network 'appliance' is an old machine doing a Bittorrent feed in Win98SE (sorry, that's all I can get to work yet-- :-) )

That does disk activity all the time.

For now, I'd like to get one of those cheap disk readers, settle on a compact flash format (CF I guess) and use the old disk drives for data only.

I prefer the Sandisk sqaure format. Thunb drives stick out of the machine and could snap off if bumped.