Is it possible to boot from Sandisk Sansa Clip ?
 

Hello all,


I would like to purchase a Sandisk Sansa Clip mp3 player.

I would like to format it and create partitions:
one partition: FAT32 or whatever the player needs to read music from .
a second partition: ext2 to install DSL or Puppy or Ubuntu
or whatever on.
Maybe a 3rd partition for another Linux distro.
And then install a bootloader (I plan on GRUB),
so I could also use the player as a bootable flash disk,
boot from it, and run Linux .

I want to know if anybody had tried it,
and if it works ?

Does the player still works after I took some Gigs from it
and assigned them as a Linux partition ?

Does the player remains a player after installing GRUB on its MBR ?

And if I screw up everything, can I still format everything,
return to the beginning, and have my original MP3 player again ?

If it works, then I'll buy the 8GB version and do the above.

If it doesn't work then I'll buy a smaller volume
(and cheaper) player, and also purchase a dedicated pen drive
for the Linux installation. I'll then have to compromise on 2 pieces
of equipment instead of one.


thanks in advance,


Babypeng

In short absolutely, it will work. MP3 players are nothing more than solid state drives with a bit of extra hardware.
People use their ipods for storage all the time... on the same token I doubt it would be any trouble to install linux and boot from it.

Remember however your will have to reformat the drive so you may lose whatever's on the drive... I don't know if this will affect the firmware that's internal to the player or not...

also remember though flash drives have a shorter lifespan than hdd's and that little mp3 player that's ment to play mp3s might die alot sooner if it's constantly reading and writing multiple files back and forth on it while you run linux off of it.