? Not just bootable, I want my flash drive to be my C: drive

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 8:58 am

Has anyone done this?

Thanks

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 10:22 am

Hello,

The issues with this are -- it can only be written to for a limited number of times, and the "speed" will be very pokey...

HueyCobra · Post by **HueyCobra** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 12:38 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:it can only be written to for a limited number of times

Not as much of an issue these days according to Dan's Data.

Felger Carbon · Post by **Felger Carbon** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 3:20 pm

64GB "C" flash drives are available if you have lots and lots of money - see the advertisement after your opening posting for the Samsung version. 1TB flash drives aren't available because only Gates and Buffet could afford them, and that's not a very big market!

scdr · Post by **scdr** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 11:54 pm

Assume you are talking a Windows system here.
Does it not work to use Drive Manager to rearrange the drives from
whatever order they start out in to an order where your flash drive is "C"?
(Might need to set Windows to boot from some other drive to do that.)

If that doesn't work, could you use the Join trick to store what you want on the flash drive (even though the root of C would still be on a hard drive).

Of course there are also adapters to let you attach CF cards to IDE,
so depending on what type of flash memory you have, you might be able to string up adapters to get it recognized as a hard drive directly.

aaa · Post by **aaa** » Thu Nov 29, 2007 12:30 am

If you're talking about a USB flash stick then most of them tend to be pretty slow. So you'd have to find a big enough "fast" stick.

Flandry · Post by **Flandry** » Thu Nov 29, 2007 7:17 am

It's certainly been done before (various accounts in cyberspace about it). I'm going to try it.

Make sure if you go the CF route that you get a fast one (the Transcend 266x is one of the best deals and fastest available) that supports fixed mode with UDMA. The Transcend one (not sure about others) uses wear leveling to achieve an estimated 1M write cycles, which is quite a lot...

I picked up my card from the egg for around $130. I bought an adapter from mini-box. It's not clear to me if the $3 adapters available at various places will support DMA mode or not, so to be safe, i bought one thats manufacturer specifically mentions DMA support. ($16 shipped)

tonyb · Post by **tonyb** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 10:54 am

Yes, I've done it with Windows 98. Temp files and swap files can be put on a RAM drive, if you're worried about writing to the flash drive. The registry can too.

(In fact, all of Win98 and apps can, if you stick 'em in a compressed volume file that is stored on the flash drive, then copied to a RAM drive and mounted. The flash drive need not be very large, thanks to the compression. I think this is not possible on later, less functional versions of Windows.)

I bought a 2GB Transcend TS2GDOM40V flash module that plugs directly into an IDE socket on the motherboard, so no secondary IDE device can be used on that socket.

Unfortunately, although it says on the box that it supports up to UDMA Mode 4, the best I can get is slow PIO mode. Either what it says is a downright lie, or the UDMA is not compatible with my Intel D815 motherboard.

Flandry · Post by **Flandry** » Sat Dec 01, 2007 7:39 pm

tonyb wrote:Yes, I've done it with Windows 98. Temp files and swap files can be put on a RAM drive, if you're worried about writing to the flash drive. The registry can too.

(In fact, all of Win98 and apps can, if you stick 'em in a compressed volume file that is stored on the flash drive, then copied to a RAM drive and mounted. The flash drive need not be very large, thanks to the compression. I think this is not possible on later, less functional versions of Windows.)

I bought a 2GB Transcend TS2GDOM40V flash module that plugs directly into an IDE socket on the motherboard, so no secondary IDE device can be used on that socket.

Unfortunately, although it says on the box that it supports up to UDMA Mode 4, the best I can get is slow PIO mode. Either what it says is a downright lie, or the UDMA is not compatible with my Intel D815 motherboard.

The problem is that not all cards support fixed mode and DMA simultaneously. Very few do, afaik. You need to check for both.

I'm still not sure if it's possible for adapter cards to not support DMA. It's not clear what the mechanism of such a lack would be.