Diskless System

5/10/2007

A diskless system is a device that contains no physical, rotating hard disk drive media, for example, hard disk emulator technology that uses nonvolatile memory. However, a diskless system might contain a removable storage device other than a hard disk, such as a floppy disk drive or a CD-ROM drive.

A diskless system can boot from the following file system sources:

  • A storage device that does not have physically rotating media, but instead uses flash memory or battery-backed RAM.
  • A bootable CD-ROM that uses the Windows XP Embedded Enhanced Write Filter (EWF).
  • A file system that is accessible through a network connection, for example, a system that boots from a file system in a remote location.
  • ROM-based storage.

The hardware configuration, writable storage capacity, and speed of the storage device are used to determine whether a diskless system can accommodate a pagefile. For information about the paging file, see Configuring the System Pagefile of a Run-Time Image.

See Also

Concepts

Volatile and Nonvolatile Storage Devices
How to Create a Bootable CD-ROM
How to Configure EWF for CompactFlash

Other Resources

Enhanced Write Filter
Design a Run-Time Image