Using live CD without a hard drive?

[killphilvol1]

I was wondering if it was possible to run a live cd without a hard drive. I have this old computer and I did have a hard drive in it but somehow one of the pins got jacked up and I couldn't fix it. I just wanted to see how it ran linux on a live cd and hopefully i can get an old hard drive off someone for free.

[Jonathan183]

You should be able to run the live CD without a hard drive present. The only issue I think you may have is if there is little RAM in the machine ... under this situation a swap partition may be required.

Have you tried running the live CD on the machine yet?

[killphilvol1]

THis computer has 384mb of ram I believe.

Yes ive tired to load up the live cd but I get the an OS not found message.

[mhanan]

Need to get into your BIOS and set it to boot from CD before HDD.

Sounds like it's looking for hard drive and not looking to disk.

[Jonathan183]

Sounds like you either need to setup BIOS to boot from CD or the live CD has not been burnt correctly.

Depending on the live CD you may have enough RAM ... I think you only just meet the Ubuntu RAM requirements. Something like DSL should run quick though ...

[L4Linux]

Or Xubuntu. It is like Ubuntu, but has a lighter desktop environment and needs less RAM.

[killphilvol1]

Need to get into your BIOS and set it to boot from CD before HDD.

Sounds like it's looking for hard drive and not looking to disk.

Yeah I found out the problem, It was the cd drive was dead or something so I put in a new one and it found it in the bios.

Everything is working now. thanks for the help.