How to make any Compact Flash card or Microdrive boot Windows XP

This is a handy method of getting around the requirement for XP to be booted from fixed media. One of the biggest problems with building a car pc or other highly mobile device is that you really should boot from a fixed media for long life as standard hard drives are not vibration friendly.

Step 1 Choosing media

For this to work, there will have to be enough room on your CF card for your install of XP plus an install of your favorite distro of Linux. With this in mind, I would recommend no less than a 4GB card. Speed is also an issue, as read and write speeds are slower than on a conventional hard drive and slower read times can lead to longer startup times. Buy the best that you can afford, as a 4GB card can be had for $10 off of ebay. Write cycles is another consideration, since all normal CF media has a limited number of write cycles. If the write cycle problem is a deal breaker, a microdrive is another good option. It has the small form factor of a CF flash drive but without the read/write limitations. The microdrive is limited to 8GB in size, but work well when coupled with a standard CF card. Note that some embedded microdrives will internally be wired as master and will not work at all in the slave position on a dual CF adapter. This will keep you from using two microdrives on the same IDE connector

Comments

[admin]

This is a great Instructable, but you need to add a main image of the final project to the intro step. Please do that and leave me a message when you have so that we can publish your work. Thanks!

[rhoderik]

"sudo gparted" will work on any distro wit them installed (with sudo intalled being the user one of the sudoers and with gparted also installed)

[0ldfart]

Cant get it to work. Installed XP to compact flash, rebooted, used ubuntu installer to resize, rebooted, selected grub option for windows : "ntldr is missing' reinstalled repeated process "ntldr is missing" Doesnt work.

[smn368]

you need to down load the ntldr file and manually put it it the root of the drive and then it should work find
http://tinyempire.com/shortnotes/files/ntldr_missing.htm

[ReCreate]

I highly recommend AT LEAST 5GB for windows xp,and 10 GB AT LEAST for anything else other than XP and under(win95,3.1.ect)

[ReCreate]

Let me refine that, I recommend at least 2GB for XP, 1GB for Windows 2000, 512 For Windows 98/95 and 128 for windows 3.1 and lower. Now, For anything newer than XP, I reccomend 10GB.

[tinkerC]

Nice idea. Would you explain how to use the Linux in step 11?

[AdHd]

Step 11?

[tinkerC]

I guess it is step 5.

[stargazer418]

The "sudo gparted" command will only work on Linux distros that are based on Debian, like Ubuntu.