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General discussion

Need to Boot to SD Disk Using PCMCIA slot in Dell Insperion 8500

Mar 2, 2004 10:43PM PST

Greetings to all,

I am in need of some help. I need to be able to remove the hard drive of my Insperion 8500, and boot to an SD card (first choice), or a compact flash card (second choice) using a 5-way PCMCIA card reader. I could use either Win XP or Win 2000 installed on the small flash media, but the requirement is that I have a very simple, tiny, portable hard drive that I can use in a laptop with no hard drive and have a productive environment in which to work, even if limited by space on the card.

I have the latest Dell Bios (A05) for the Insperion, but the Bios has only 7 options for booting:
- Boot to Diskette Drive (Note: I don't have a floppy in this laptop. Just the DVD burner)
- Boot to CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive
- Boot to Internal HDD Drive
- Boot to USB Storage Device
- Boot to Modular Bay HDD
- Boot to CARDBUS NIC
- Boot to Onboard NIC

1. Can I make the computer boot to the Cardbus NIC, and instead of having a NIC in the PCMCIA slot, have my reader and an SD Disk with an operating system in it?

2. Or Can I modify the BIOS so that I can boot to the PCMCIA disk, whatever it is that I have in there?

3. My second third choice I guess would be to boot to something like a USB thumb drive which then tells the computer to look to the SD Disk in the PCMCIA for the operating system.

4. Does the SD disk have a fast enough data transfer rate to be able to support what I want to do?

Again, at the risk of redundancy, my goal is to have one very small hard drive to carry around with me. I can then insert the SD Disk into the laptop, and boot to it without even having a Hard drive in the laptop. I realize I won't have very much space on the SD Disk or Compact Flash once I have an operating system on it, but that is not a limiting factor as long as it works and it is not too slow.

Any help on how to go about implementing this or what I am missing in the way of thought process or reason would be greatly appreciated!


Computer Specs:
Dell Insperion 8500
1.2 GHz
Level 2 Cache: 512 KB
512 MB Ram at 266 Mhz
64 MB Video Ram

Discussion is locked

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Re:Need to Boot to SD Disk Using PCMCIA slot in Dell Insperion 8500
Mar 3, 2004 7:33AM PST

This is certainly out of my field, but my first thought would be to place the flash card in an external usb card reader, set the bios to usb mass storage device, and attempt to boot from there.
I hope this helps, but I've never tried such a thing.

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Re:Need to Boot to SD Disk Using PCMCIA slot in Dell Insperion 8500
Mar 4, 2004 9:03AM PST

you don't have much choice except what Ernie says. i wouldn't count on it working though. also, you will find it very, very slow. portable computers are not designed to what you want unless you swap hard drives. XP, BTW, doesn't like to install unless you have 1G free on the drive you are installing to. W2K likes at least 300M free.

Herb....

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Re:Re:Need to Boot to SD Disk Using PCMCIA slot in Dell Insperion 8500
Mar 4, 2004 9:11PM PST

Thanks for the help guys. It's not the answer I was hoping to have, but maybe I'll try getting a USB 2.0 CF reader and use a 4 GB Microdrive. That might be my only option.
Erine, Thanks for that option. Herb, thanks for that info on what XP and Win2K like to have in the way of free disk space. That would have been ugly.
If you think of anything else, please let me know. I'm going to continue to check this daily for any ideas or workarounds.
Thanks again!
Steve