I am a freelance computer/software technician in the little known area in west Nebraska, United States. I do a lot of house calls for computer repairs and many many more in office repairs at my home lab for clients and also I do a lot with my own systems that I am either building for future clients or to order or well for myself lol...
I have been looking for a low cost disk on module solution for a while, basically what I'm after is a lot like the usb 2 internal D.O.M.(disk on module) solutions that are available for enterprise systems they are basically small capacity SSDs that are mainly used for high availability storage for bootloaders and recovery operations and that is what I'm after but I don't like what the market has to offer
I don't need a bulky flash module with a large nand package that can only either sit flat on top of the usb 2 motherboard header and possible interfere with other headers or vertically off the motherboard header that will stick out super far and again possible interfere with other parts this is especially problematic in many of the systems I build that are mini itx of the 11 letters or less variety with full water cooling and high end gpus with already bulky sometimes custom cooling and mounting solutions ya there just is never enough room in those systems for a usb motherboard header to usb male adapter and usb drive if i can even find any that enable write protection and these little internal disk on modules aren't that much smaller unfortunately even tho they look like very simple devices and in fact the one I have is and it is also one of the smallest i could find, neither of those is really a problem but many of the ones offered are dated and most of them are IDE interfaces only a couple of them use usb and only 1 or 2 that I can find have options for a read only mode enabled by the usb peripheral chipset, the one i have now is a Chinese biwin brand 4gb module that I found from some rando off ebay and I have no idea how long it will last but it accomplishes what I want it gives me a small bootable device that is now with some jumper soldering read only and it allows me to boot into a netboot.xyz pxe system that exposes many many Linux live distros that I can then either run in memory as a live system or go ahead and install onto persistent storage either an ssd or a hdd but manly it gives me access to a virtual rom disk that I cant accidentally wipe with a simple fdisk command as root that in my experience doesn't prevent you from wiping out the disk ur currently working from as u are likely working in memory so fdisk will gladly wipe out ur boot media
(pain in my @@s)
lol, so what I have come up with as a solution to this is I simply need a kind of read only boot disk (like a dvd rom minus the dvd and dvd drive lol) but I don't want to have to use external media such as write protected usbs(that are impossible to find on the market and in my parts bins lol) or simply dvd roms as I plan to deploy my solution into the internals of many of my clients systems as they end up with similar issues when they either don't know what they are doing or they are just adept enough to be dangerous like me and they try to dual boot some random linux distro and they end up wiping out there windows efi loader and they end up with either no bootable options and no usbs lying around with a convenient recovery solution somehow?
even tho they just wiped out there system with presumably a linux installer of some kind but they don't want to actually go into linux and have to figure out how to recover there own stuff so it ends up either at my office for the millionth time or i end up in there home for the millionth time to recover there dead system...
this seems trivial and to many including myself its a dumb problem to have but do you know what would be a great solution to this short of installing a dvd rom drive into those clients systems and trusting them not to scratch there recovery dvds or lose them or even lose the usb i provided to them with all the tools needed to be able to leave me alone unless they want to pay me again for repeat service wich nobody wants lol...
a good solution would be a little hidden bootable media thats in there computer that i can walk them threw how to boot to over the phone that can recover there windows efi or even give them a whole new install all that is possible with a simple little 2mb netboot.xyz.iso that can also simply copy the needed efi files back to the system partition of the windows target disk that may not be the exact right files for there specific install but it will enable the bootup of the automated windows recovery system and boot repair that will restore the proper efi files and sign them so boom perfect
but for this we don't need a 4gb nand usb system on a chip its not quite big enough for a full windows or any other live iso that they would want to use and its completely overkill for what i would need to be able to recover from my own mishaps with fidisk lol,
but what is possible is a simple ventoy install into a 32mb fat16 efi/legacy bootloader that can then bootstrap an iso off an arbitrary sized exfat partition on that same physical disk and boot a iso off that disk as if the entire disk was formatted with that one iso(this is exactly what ventoy is and is what im using now with the 4gb module i already have)
now i would not need ventoy or any of those tools so simply boot into netboot.xyz that could be done with a floppy image off a Qpsi flash chip but the motherboard must to be able to interface with that spi chip as if it was a universal scsi of some kind either usb or sata so here my idea a tiny qspi or pspi chip of say 64MB(a common verity of spi chip here is one from digikey for reference MX25U6432FM2I02)
nand chip on a small maybe 1 or 2 cm board with a usb 2 header because lets face it that header is legacy and in 99% of the systems i service is simply never used but is present of every board from enterprise servers to consumer gaming boards,
unlike the sata ports and the usb 3 headers that are almost always used unless the client if loaded then they use only m.2 but still no sense wasting a sata port on a minimal bootloader lol(I actually don't know what the minimum size could be but I know the ventoy installer won't install if it cant make a fat16 partition of at least 32mb and there are required minimums for exfat but if someone has some ideas on this like is there a type of spi flash that can act as a floppy and be read to like a floppy from universal serial bus...idk)
so usb 2 internal header is perfect and speed really is not and issue at all considering the iso is only 2mb so what i want to design with a lot of help on a opensource platform is a small disk on module using usb 2 headers maybe only one of the actual usb interface not 2 that are on that one header but it can use 2 that's fine i want to make this as easy as possible and most importantly low cost as i will be buying dozens of these either as kits or completed products and the rest can be sold as complete integrated recovery solutions to other system integrators or just tinkers like me lol...
ok my poor writing skills are showing themselves right now lol...
basically i am looking for advice on this or even a mockup schematic that i can turn around a source parts and get somebody to prototype the proof of concept with gerber files lol,
is this crazy and undoable,
can we design a small low power low cost module that is very tiny maybe the same footprint as a tpm module or mini usb stick but with a female usb 2 internal header on it and a some arbitrary but small spi chip or some other nand or nor chip that would also be small and a usb peripheral storage controller and all the passives necessary and most importantly but easily accomplished with the right controller is wright protection
(i would imagine this is actually a lot easier than i am thinking right now as literally i would only need to flash the actual spi chip with the filesystem once and that can be done with a external flasher before assembly so really the device only needs to be able to present itself as a bootable rom to the uefi or bios and that's it u would have an always available backup bootloader no matter what even if u have no usb drives with bootable systems handy u could start from a simple disk on module and a network connection and eventually with the help of a little experience and some time on google and typing end up back at a fully bootable windows or linux install enjoying ur games again or...
...what ever you do on ur system lol i dont judge...
what do we think? am I just trying to rehash a already made solution or is this doable...
i have enough soldering skills to be able to do this myself but actually designing the board and finding the right active and passive components is completely above my head lol...
i know about qspi flash from my tinkering with microcontrollers and iv gathered enough c++ experience to make this happen software wise but the hardware and design...NOPE
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