My "Diskless" experience

[NucleusKore]

Hi everybody
After a difficult time with my PC for the past few weeks, I narrowed down the problem to a failing hard disk. This experience taught me that while SMART may say everything is OK, you can still have bad sectors on your hard disk, as diagnosed by the manufacturer's (WD) tool, downloaded from their website. I returned the hard disk for replacement on Monday; guess that puts a lot of my work on hold, or does it?

I have always used pendrive linux as a data recovery tool, and sometimes just as a toy. So I was in the ideal situation to try it as temporary replacement for my missing hard disk OS. I downloaded and installed Slax, and to be frank with you, I'm impressed. I am able to do EACH AND EVERYTHING that I was doing on my regular Ubuntu on hard disk, including running Virtualbox ! I customised the default ui a little as I am a big fan of KDE 3.5.x, I do miss it.

Am sharing some screenshots with you:

[phreak0ut]

That's really awesome!! It's really hard to trust few hard disk diagnostic tools. Always good to trust your instincts, atleast when it comes to computers

[din]

Cool.

This is really nice.

[Pathik]

It works great, but reduces your flash drive's life greatly. There are a lot of read/write cycles involved.

[TheHumanBot]

awesome thanks for sharing

[max_demon]

i was running ubuntu from livecd everytime i started comp because i didnt had hdd,usb pen drive or anything etc.

[NucleusKore]

Originally Posted by Pathik

It works great, but reduces your flash drive's life greatly. There are a lot of read/write cycles involved.

^Yes, so

"If you can, use some journaling filesystems (like XFS) instead of FAT or ext2. And always use only devices with support for 'wear levelling', designed to distribute the re-writes across the medium, in order to prolong its life."

Source: http://www.slax.org/documentation_usb_troubleshoot.php

[Liverpool_fan]

I use Slax too. It's really awesome. I can have all my programs on the go, and KDE is perfect for use albeit a little slow. Xfce and LXDE make nice alternative DE though.

[chesss]

It works great, but reduces your flash drive's life greatly. There are a lot of read/write cycles involved.

I have heard this , but I now doubt if this is true.
coz like I have played around a lot with pen drives OSes and well my pen drive still works . maybe instead of 4 years the pen drive will last for 3 years. but who cares , they are ultra cheap now

[MasterMinds]

I am in a same situation as the thread opener now! I think this is the best solution! Plz guide me how to make it work! I have 4 gb pendrive!

[NucleusKore]

Originally Posted by MasterMinds

I am in a same situation as the thread opener now! I think this is the best solution! Plz guide me how to make it work! I have 4 gb pendrive!

http://www.slax.org/documentation.php

[MasterMinds]

Thanks sir

[NucleusKore]

Day before yesterday, I tried running Slax from my external HDD and was successful, even though all it has is a single ntfs partition. Used it as such for two days, and I can say that it was much better than the pendrive experience. What I liked was the fact that I just had to extract the slax.tar archive to the hard disk, and run liloinst.sh to install the bootloader. It also comes with a bat file to install lilo from Windows. No repartitioning or any kind of circus was required.

I got my replacement WD hard disk today; I think what they sent me is a better one. I now have a 160 GB WD Caviar blue.

This marks the end of my experiment. I'd like to thank all of you who have been following this thread. I see a role for slax as a recovery tool. And so I was just thinking, Windows can only recognise one, the first, partition on a pendrive and open it. So why now repartition my 8 GB pendrive such that it has two partitions, a first ntfs partition and a second ext3 partition with the base Slax (maybe 400 - 500 MB, let's see).

I'll post on this tomorrow.