PC Hard Drive

[KaRyu]

Is it possible to put a file in a pc hard drive without turning on the pc?

 

[picbits]

SATA or IDE ?

Is it connected to the PC when you want to put the file on or do you mean you want to take it out of the PC and put files on it ?

What kind of file ? What kind of filesystem ? FAT32 / NTFS / EXT3 ?

A general answer to your question assuming the hard drive is in the PC is "not easily"

 

[KaRyu]

What I want is to create a device for a computer that will enable a usb flash drive to transfer its files into the hard drive inside a pc without turing it on.

That device is to be connected in the PC just like a USB ports

 

[picbits]

The PC would need to be on to provide power to the hard drive and USB ports.

It is possible with buffers / digital switches and some serious microcontroller programming.

What is your level of electronics and programming ? Do you have any microcontroller knowledge ? Have you looked at the USB protocol and also what is needed to communicate with a SATA device ?

You would be better looking at putting a small Linux system on the USB stick and a routine/script to copy what is in a certain directory or partition on that stick to the PC internal hard drive in a certain directory then perform a machine power off. You'd then set your boot sequence on the PC to boot from the USB device first.

 

[crutschow]

Why would you want to go to all the effort of trying to write directly to the hard drive when it's so easy to turn on the pc?

 

[KaRyu]

Why would you want to go to all the effort of trying to write directly to the hard drive when it's so easy to turn on the pc?

Not all PC takes very small time to boot.

 

[KaRyu]

The PC would need to be on to provide power to the hard drive and USB ports.

It is possible with buffers / digital switches and some serious microcontroller programming.

What is your level of electronics and programming ? Do you have any microcontroller knowledge ? Have you looked at the USB protocol and also what is needed to communicate with a SATA device ?

You would be better looking at putting a small Linux system on the USB stick and a routine/script to copy what is in a certain directory or partition on that stick to the PC internal hard drive in a certain directory then perform a machine power off. You'd then set your boot sequence on the PC to boot from the USB device first.

Thank you

 

[atferrari]

An approach to...

Machines with little software in them and lot of RAM tend to boot fast, that is, in little time.

Change the writing to reading and you have paved the way to stealing more than openly / publicly copying. If that is the real idea behind, not me, thanks.

 

[picbits]

Machines without Microsoft Software on boot even faster

 

[Inquisitive]

In my humble opinion. It won't work.

Hard drives function via rotation. The data is layed out in tracks and sectors. As the magnetic media aka platter of the drive rotates, the head encodes the digital data (binary 0's and 1's) onto the substrate. Drives come in different rotational speeds also (5400rpm, 7200rpm). The faster data transfer being the 7200rpm model. I would think without the function of drive rotation you would not be able to control the physical sectors of sequential data onto the hard drive. As this information is kept in the a series of tables that maintain track & sector organisation also. What you are proposing goes against the present designed technology.

The project your suggesting seems impossible if not unrealistic.

If waiting for a PC to attain full boot takes too long, then you should have experienced the early days of computing.

During the early days of computing it was not uncommon to create a program and run the program over night and come back the following day to see the results. Myself, having created fractal displays in "C" this way. Yup, they were worth the wait. Then the math co-processor came to fruition!

 

[dr pepper]

Yes it can be done, there are projects round to do it, if you want to use a pc file system like fat32 then it becomes a little more compex.