I've got a 5 year old laptop that had its HDD die. Its been sitting around for a while.

I was wondering if it would be possible to run something like Jolicloud or another 'lite' OS from a USB thumbdrive without needing an actual HDD on the machine?

If so, what size thumbdrive would be necessary? I've got a 4 gig drive sitting around somewhere that I could use.

If this isn't possible, anybody got a cheap working laptop HDD for sale?

6/23/2011 5:15:29 PM

It's possible if your laptop supports booting from a USB device.

6/23/2011 5:24:42 PM

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

^Makes downloading, installing, and making a bootable USB drive runnning Ubuntu as easy as clicking a few buttons

6/23/2011 5:46:32 PM

So I got the laptop in question out today

Its been sitting since December

I know it was clicking in December

turned it on, and it said 'resume Windows normally?'

so yeah HDD not dead, but not reliable. Now that I can create a back up CD on this I might just get a new HDD

I'm still going to look at the Jolicloud setup though...........seems interesting

6/23/2011 5:51:01 PM