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RAM and the OS
| >>137409 in theory yes but....
Cut the power from the ram and it is all wiped so it's a terrible idea..
| Not for Darknet drug dealers
| Ramdisk exist for this purpose, my g/u/rl. This is also how Linux LiveCD (or LiveDisk) works — usually they'd have a squashed (compressed) filesystem that they'd decompress to a ramdisk.
As >>137411 have said, however, RAM is a volatile storage. It doesn't keep any data it receives, unlike the common storage mediums. So even if the OS were to load from RAM, it needs to be stored somewhere, still.
| And no, I don't mean that "Oh, it's only the user data getting wiped" — no, I mean the whole thing is wiped. Your OS installation? Gone. A reboot is enough to literally wipe clean whatever data you have on your RAM.
| TailsOS. There's a reason it's the go-to OS for when you REALLY don't want people to track you
| You can. Install a copy of Windows, create a Ramdisk, then in a hypervisor create a new VM and move its storage onto the ramdisk. Then, as long as the host OS is on, you can turn on or off the guest os, but if you cut the power, you lose everything.
| >>137664
Actually any liveCD with kernels 4.1+ running on systems with at least twice the RAM size of the boot media size. Kernel will boot from bootmedia, then all bootmedia will be copied to ram, then boot process will proceed from there. You could get rid of bootmedia at this point.
Normally livedistros do not do this as it is a waste of ram. But it is doable in any livedistro at bootpoint by adding a kernel option at the bootloader.
| You can load an entire operating system into ram from an external source, there are a few small linux distros that do this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM
| I have a small digital organizer from 1997 that runs off a couple button cell batteries. There is a chip, but all the user data is basically in volatile memory so if you ran out of battery you lose it all.
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| Can you (in theory) load an complete operating system into ram and create an pc without any non ram memory?