HD Install :: Best way of installing to CF

Adssse, the 44 pin adapter is made to plug directly into a laptop hard drive slot. The 40 pin model plugs into a standard ide hard drive cable. I now have both. My hard drive died in this laptop that I am presently using and I am running a frugal install on a 512 mb CF partitioned with 60 mb for hda1 and the balance for hda2. I have mydsl, backup/restore, and opt on hda2. The laptop is maxed out at 256 mb of ram so I am not using the toram option because I found out the hard way that it is easy to use up your ram and crash the system with only 256mb.

I am also using a similar setup on small mini ITX type system and use the 40 pin model on this system. So far both systems work great as long as I do not try running too many apps at once since I have no swap in either system.

While we are on this subject, wouldn't it be neat to have a ram disk card that could plug in to the ide bus like the cf adapters do. You could use the cf as the master and the ram disk as slave. You could have a large cf partitioned with about 50 or 60 mb for frugal and the rest for ram disk backup. The ram disk could have your home, opt, mydsl and a large swap file. You could have a script that would set up the ram disk partitions and copy the contents of the second partition of your cf to the ram disk at boot up and have another script to copy the ram disk back to the cf to save your changes when you shut down.

This would be great for ram challenged older systems and also there would be no motors to run. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

Thanks for the reply mgmont. I am thinking about buying the adapter and the cf card. My hardrives are still going strong (knock on wood) but it just interests me and I kinda want to try it. The only concern of mine is running out of ram like you were talking about. I have 128mb right now and since it is an old computer it is maxed out.

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