I have one concern about booting this way: You may want the ATA adapter and CF card on a separate IDE channel/cable from the hard drive as opposed to CF as Master and HDD as slave. IIRC any info to be sent to the slave drive must first pass thru the control circuitry for the master drive. I don't know for sure that CF has this for one thing and I don't know if it is slower than standard IDE ATA HDDs (Like how I put three TLAs together?). Anyway, be aware of this possible problem, research it and test it out to be sure. The Peanut Gallery has spoken.

BTW, you can find these adapters via the DamnSmall Linux store, at mp3car.com, directron.com, cablesonline.com and a few other places. Shop around, I've seen em for $10 or less. You can also find at these same stores laptop to std IDE hard drive adapters. It is good to have one around so you can fix a friend's or customer's laptop drive in your computer. I use one to put laptop drives in my USB HDD enclosure so I never have to shutdown my PC to put a drive in there.

As a further aside, you can use CF drives to run an entire distro for firewall or gateway server. A few of our members have done this for running M0n0wall and IPCop firewalls. For small special application distros that load from disk to RAM and have very little disk access otherwise, this is a perfect setup. You can log to an external PC or server that has a real HDD or disable logging. This lets you get a quieter, cooler, smaller footprint PC/appliance.

Brian Kelsay

-----Original Message----- From: On Behalf Of Leo Mauler Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 10:46 PM

I just wanted to let everyone know that the Compaq PC I was going to boot using a USB memory key, turns out not to support USB booting. I was a couple of numbers off on the Compaq serial number.

Fortunately, I've discovered an alternative: Compact Flash cards. Seems you can buy a Compact Flash interface card which attaches like a regular expansion card to your computer. On one end you plug in a Compact Flash card, and on the other end you plug in a regular IDE cable. The expansion card doesn't use a PCI slot. The card has jumpers to select Master/Slave (no Cable Select I'm afraid) and you power it using a regular floppy power connector.

Since /boot can fit into 50MB or less, I'm going to make a 64MB Compact Flash card into the boot directory. This will let me use an 80GB hard drive in a computer which has a 64GB hard drive limit BIOS.

This did get me to thinking about the whole concept of putting huge hard drives into very old computers, as Compact Flash completely masquerades as IDE. Even if the system doesn't boot USB, it will almost certainly boot CF on an adapter. This makes it a lot easier to bring old hardware back into circulation with larger new hard drives: instead of a 10 year old 1GB hard drive for a /boot directory, you can use a 1 year old CF Card.

I'm going to try booting from a CF Card on my old laptop one of these days: it has an 8.4GB limit and I have this nice 10GB laptop hard drive lying around, as well as a PCMCIA CF Card adapter.