On Saturday 21 November 2009, David Winter wrote: >Dear All, > Anyone used a CF card as a hard drive? I thought I read >here that someone has done it >but I searched the wiki and didn't find anything. I have a card and >adapter which I have partitioned >with fdisk and formatted using format c: /s ( DOS ) but my PC >won't boot from it. All help and >advice gratefully received. BTW, I have no idea how to set my BIOS >for this card, which is a >8 GB Kingston 133x card. I don't know if it needs CHS,, LBA, >Large , what sort of UDMA >access, etc. > > Thanks >in advance, > > David >Winter. >P.S. Thanks to everyone who contribute to EMC2, only wish I was smart >enough to contribute :-(
Your time may well come, David. As far as using a cf card for a hard drive, the limited write cycle lifetime of the cf would make that a bit of a tossup for long term dependability when using a normal filesystem that does its housekeeping in the background, so it _must_ be treated as absolutely read-only in day to day operations. That said, I have a box sitting on the next table, an old K6-iii and 384 megs of dram in it, that is booting from a cf card plugged into an adapter which in turn is plugged onto the end of an 80 wire EIDE cable and is effectively drive 0 (C to the winderz folks). There are no other drives in that box, just a couple of 100 megabit ethernet cards and an atheros based wireless 802-11a/b/g card. It runs headless although I can put a monitor and keyboard on it if I should have to. With uptimes measured in years, the monitor has probably died of neglect by now, its an old 19" crt that was getting flaky anyway. I do most maintenance by logging into its web server from the LAN side, and WAN side logins are disabled. It runs a router program called dd-wrt, the best kept secret in bulletproof routers there is. No one, and it is being attacked many times a second, has ever gotten past it that I did not give the password to first. One of the ethernet cards faces the DSL modem, the other an 8 port switch that the rest of my stuff is plugged into. None of the machines on this side of dd-wrt runs a firewall, its not needed. It (iptables) would probably be good insurance, but its also something else that needs to be maintained. dd-wrt (a busybox derivative) treats it as read-only unless an update has been downloaded and is being installed. Best of both worlds in this case. But booting a normal linux like the version we use for emc, that uses ext3 as the filesystem would probably use it up in a week or 2. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. <https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp> You know what they say -- the sweetest word in the English language is revenge. -- Peter Beard ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
