Minimizing boot time?

[peliot]

Background: I am planning to set up my Windows 7 laptop with dual boot and TCL, so that I can boot with TCL when all I need to do is look something up on the web or check email (webmail).  In anticipation of that project I am experimenting with TCL in Virtualbox to see how quickly it boots.

Question: What configuration and boot codes are best for reducing boot time?
 I already use norestore and tce=hda1 to eliminate the restore process and the scan for tce directory.  The only extension that gets loaded is minefield.

Related question: Booting a VM from the TCL .iso image is 7 or 8 seconds faster than booting from the installed VM Hard Drive.  Any reason why that would be the case? 

Thanks,
P

[u54749]

A boot setup with GRUB4DOS is a good way to go :

-  no repartitioning or reformatting required
-  no emulation layer:  you run on the bare hardware

I work myself this way:  Tinycore itself, the extensions, the persistent home and the swap space all reside in a Windows subdirectory on a NTFS disk.  When I power up my PC I get a boot menu and I can choose to boot either Tinycore or Windows.

If you want a really fast boot you will have to make custom remasters.  The trick is to do as much as possible of the work before the boot, and do almost no work during the boot itself.

For your usage profile I would put Minefield and its dependencies directly in the remaster.  You will get a somewhat bigger tinycore.gz but the app will be ready when booted.

 If you need persistency you will also have to put ntfs-3g in the master, to be able to write your persistent data to the Windows disk.

You should be able to get a boot time of 10 seconds this way (time measured between the first GRUB boot message and the moment the desktop comes up).

Myself I boot in 12 seconds on my eight year old DELL box,  with an extensive set of applications.