On 2007-09-08 12:12:14 +0100, tony sayer said:

NE1 any experience of getting a windows PC to boot from a flash card or
flash type memory at all?...

Yes you can do it most easily with a compact flash card or equivalent
plus an adaptor that emulates an IDE interface.

However, this may not be very long lived. The problem is that the
Windows monitor writes temporary and other files all over the place and
generally makes a mess. Flash memory devices often have a limited
number of allowable read/write cycles before going tits up.

The technique is much easier to do with operating systems. For
example, with Linux, one can mount all of the filesystems bar one as
read-only. During boot, a Ramdisk is created and files that need to
be RW or temporary files can be put on that. I have this working in
a little dedicated, embedded machine used as a terminal server. It
even has a watchdog timer to reboot if ever needed, but it hasn't been
so far in two years.

If you want to do an embedded type of application, there are some
products around optimised with what's needed. I've used Advantech
stuff a few times with good results.