Compact Flash - IDE project started.

**Genesis** · 03-27-2002, 01:17 AM

I finally got around to starting this project after reading a few posts about it. Everyone seems to talk about it but no one has gone through with it yet, so here goes. I had a few CF cards floating around from my camera. Ive just bought a CF- PCM-CIA adapter, and have taken it apart to expose the pins. Ill get the whole thing soldered up in the next few days and see if it works.

If Winamp is the Shell, with nothing else loaded, surely the PC has no need to write the the CF card or does it? Lets see...................

**MikeHunt79** · 03-27-2002, 08:27 AM

good luck... if you read the thread under "commercal hardware discussion" them the is a link in the CF thread saying how to boot windows from a cd-rom.... If you follow this tutorial, but think of the CF as CDROM, and it should work.

Let us know how it goes.

**mp3z24** · 03-27-2002, 09:18 AM

please let us know about the life of those compact flash cards. from what i have read, they have a life span of only 300,000 write cycles. good for something like a camera, but for windows, which re-writes all the time, i am a little bit unsure. i was thinking of getting a flash drive for windows/ boot, but the life cycle worried me.

keep us updated.

~mike

**Aaron Cake** · 03-27-2002, 09:44 AM

Remember to disable the swap file, and if possible use Policy editor to set every setting to "read only" to avoid registry writes.

However, I would think that a CF card would be short lived in this application. I can easily see Win95/98 doing 100,000 writes in an hour.

**fogleroller** · 03-27-2002, 09:48 AM

What if you used a small laptop hard drive for data (mp3's) swap file, program files folder, etc.....

I am looking to do this also, just waiting for the price of 512MB CF cards to go down.

**theconns** · 03-27-2002, 10:23 AM

Create a ramdisk, load the OS from the Compact Flash onto the ramdisk on boot, most of the writes are then made to the ramdisk rather that the CF.

**Loftus** · 03-27-2002, 10:32 AM

Anyone tried or heard about "onlydisk". It plugs into USB port and is the size of a keychain. Supports BIOS booting as USB hard disk. On its bottom, there is a write protection switch preventing the inside files from being overwritten or virus infected: ¡°open¡± means the OnlyDisk can be read and written; ¡°closed¡± means the OnlyDisk can only be read but not written.

check it out, http://www.netac.com/products/goods.asp

i've seen them for 128MB $200 canadian, at some Toronto stores. Keep in mind no adapter is needed so it might be worthwhile checking out.

**mp3z24** · 03-27-2002, 10:58 AM

hmmmm, very interesting... but what does all that mean though?

is this thing just a small usb hard drive?

would you load windows on this usb drive and then boot from usb? and have a second HD with all your other programs and files on it?

can you boot windows with the drive as read only?

if you can do what im asking, then this could be a good option. (for me at least

)

so many questions... sorry.

~Mike

edit....
wait, to good to be true?
from onlydisk website: OnlyDisk is an USB-based flash memory disk

**Genesis** · 03-27-2002, 04:36 PM

Is there a way to log the amount of times the the pc writes to the disk? I still dont think windows would be writing to the cf card if winamp is loaded as the shell.
I also bought a 20 gig Laptop drive yesterday that I will be storing my mp3's on. Im looking at buying a 1 gig Celeron, the new one with the 256k cache. It onlt runs at something like 1.4v so the power consumption should be better than the last batch.
A friend of mine who works in a PC wholesale place said that they have booted windows running these new Celerons without a heatsink! They only get marginally warm with no load. Not recomended tho

This should say something for their current drain on the power supply. Hopefully Ill find a way to run one with my Sproggy.

**cyber_mage** · 03-27-2002, 06:10 PM

I have done this with linux and a 8meg Msystems DOC. It works and works nicely. But this was only on a router type system. I am currently going to try the same process on my player. I also have a cf-to-IDE adaptor that I am hoping will play nicely with a cd-rom drive.

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