Is there a linux distro that can run without a harddrive?

December 29, 2006 10:02 AM

I have a three year old HP laptop with no hard drive. Is there some sort of cd I can pop in it to see if its working otherwise?

I don't know anything about Linux, but occasionally I hear people reference distributions that sounds like they'll do this.

Failing that, are there any other options for me to test this without buying a hard drive.

posted by miniape to computers & internet (8 comments total)

i'm no linux expert but earlier this month i was fooling around with damn small linux on an 8 year old laptop without a hard drive... even got a wireless usb dongle working with it.
posted by noloveforned at 10:07 AM on December 29, 2006

Any 'live cd' distribution will do it. Knoppix has broad hardware support.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 10:07 AM on December 29, 2006

Ubuntu will give you a nice little desktop on their boot/install CD. You just download and burn an ISO file. I found it very no-fuss.
posted by cowbellemoo at 10:20 AM on December 29, 2006

any "live cd" distro will do... "damn smal"l at 50 megswould be my first choice... or you could use puppy linux
puppy will also wite to a cd-r/ dvd-r to save your settings, if you want to reuse the config.
posted by digital-dragonfly at 10:48 AM on December 29, 2006

"damm smal"l ="damn small"
posted by digital-dragonfly at 10:49 AM on December 29, 2006

There are tons of these live distributions. Knoppix, mepis, ubuntu, puppy, dsl, etc. it just depends on what you want to use it for. Knoppix in my opinion is the most complete and has pretty much everything you need with very little tweaking.

You can also run some of these on flash drives- DSL for instance, which gives you the option to save.
posted by eleongonzales at 11:41 AM on December 29, 2006

Or if you want to run windows there is always BartPE.
posted by Ferrari328 at 12:58 PM on December 29, 2006

There are some good "check out a system" utilities on UBCD and Hiren's BootCD. When you're done getting a feel for the basic specs, let Memtest86 cook for a few hours.
posted by Myself at 7:09 PM on December 29, 2006