Install Windows XP on CF Card

I have an old compaq laptop that I am bringing back to life for my parents. The only thing it needs is a hard drive. The IDE drive in it now grinds badly and just stops spinning ... which isn't a good thing at all.

Also, what about SD

I see these card adapters on ebay that go from internal IDE to the CF card. I would like to get an adapter and 16GB CF card for them. I should be able to do this for under $40. It should provide good boot times for it and IF it has to go to pagefile it would be quick.

Is there anything special that I have to do to get this to work? Does it just see the CF card or do I have to do anything crazyt with xp installation.

 

Use an IDE to CF. You can find it on ebay. But in my opinion, with 40$, you can get an old IDE HDD, faster and easy to install.

 

If you want to partition your CF as FAT/FAT32, you will have to jump through hoops to get the installation to go through. If you want to partition your CF as NTFS, the installation should go through as it would on any other SSD/HDD.

The cheap adapters on eBay generally work just as well as the ones from Adaptec, etc. On my TC4200, the generic eBay adapter I originally used offered more or less the same performance as the four-times-as-expensive dual-bay Adaptec device I later used.

I would recommend getting a faster CF as opposed to a larger one. I've never actually tested anything slower than 266x, but even my 300x CF has pretty crappy random write speeds, which can lead to occasional stuttering. Thus I'm a bit hesitant on using 100x, 133x, etc, drives. You can get some pretty big 300+ cards now, but they run just as much as a cheap JMicron SSD, which will arguably give you significantly better performance.

I wouldn't recommend doing this on an SD card. AFAIK, there aren't any SD cards that get remotely close to the speed of a 300x CF in sequential or random writes. CF cards have the added benefit of supporting DMA modes like a standard hard drive, though I'm not completely sure what effects this has on performance.

Ultimately, I got my setup for about $50 with the generic adapter and a 4GB 300x CF card. Totally satisfied with it; save the space as the occasional stuttering, I've found it much better than a traditional HDD and I wouldn't go back.

 

Dont waste your time and money. CF cards have low write cycle life. Using CF cards as hard drives will destroy them in a matter of months.

 

... been using mine on a daily basis for almost a year now. No signs of impending failure, though I understand it can happen instantaneously

 

Speed I'm not really concerned with - my parents just want the laptop. And they just check email and play games on pogo ... very rarely is there any significant hard drive activity.

But looks like a good CF card would be too expesnive for what it is. I may just end up getting a used IDE drive for it.

I understand the downsides of using flash memory as storage. I don't trust it too much myself, but it seems to be popular to use both SD and CF cards. I'm currently running my netbook on an SD card and I have been using it constant since May ...works no problems so far. Hopefully it will continue to have no problems.