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RE: Low Power King

The advantage of booting from a USB disk is that you are booting from your USB, which means that you control the hardware. You can put whatever operating system you want on the USB stick. I use a USB micro SD card plugged into a USB-microSD adapter and write an operating system image on the SD card. I burn these images using Win32DiskImager.exe from .iso files that I download, e.g. a distribution ISO. You can run a version of Linux that runs off of the distribution media entirely in RAM and you will have full access to the storage on the machine, including its boot ROM. After I am done changing the contents of the file system to make the computer work the way I want, then I remove the USB stick and reboot from the normal boot drive.

I have used this method to recover systems that had scrambled files. On one system which was an older Dell Tower Machine I used this method to reinstall the operating system from scratch because the people who donated this machine had not given me the administrator password. I have also used this method to install Linux on several older Windows machines. They dual boot and the Linux system has full access to all the Windows file system. This made it possible to migrate an old Windows XP server to run on Linux so that it could receive security updates without having to convert over the file system that held several hundred GB of web site files.

These new low power computer systems are so cheap that you can afford a "throw away" system to play with without worrying about destroying a system you need or losing your data. If you aren't familiar with Linux this is an convenient way to learn.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: Low Power King - Tony Lauck 06/19/1506:46:11 06/19/15 (0)

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