Top result from google landed into a yahoo post. In the answer the poster is saying I can with LiveCD. But the post is about 5 years old and that's like a decade in technology world. So I'm asking again can I start (remind you only start not want to work) a computer without any hard drive?
Also I want to ask can I start a computer with an external hard drive that works like LiveCD?
35 Answers
The very first IBM PCs would start a BASIC interpreter in ROM if no hard drives, floppies, or other boot media was present. If you had a hard drive in your system, seeing this would scare you, as it could mean your hard drive failed.
When non-IBM companies cloned the PC (Compaq was the first to do that, I believe), rather than include a clone of BASIC ROM, their BIOS would merely display the message "Missing Operating System" - which is what you will see if you power on your system and no bootable device is found.
A few computers had DOS in ROM and would start that (e.g. the Tandy 1000TL) if nothing else was bootable.
To this day, if no hard drives are connected and nothing like a USB drive is connected, and there isn't a bootable CD in the CD drive, you'll see the typical manufacturer logo, and then a "Missing Operating System" or "No Bootable Device Found, Press {something} to enter setup", etc. It's still like this now.
Also I want to ask can I start a computer with an external hard drive that works like LiveCD?
You should. When you install a live distro to a USB drive you are doing just that. No reason why you can't use an external drive in place of it during the install process. As with booting via USB you may need to bring up the BIOS boot menu to select the drive instead of what it tries to boot off of from default.
"Also I want to ask can I start a computer with an external hard drive that works like LiveCD?"
yes, using a tool such as LinuxLive USB
you can install to a usb device and even assign persistent storage on some distributions of linux.
Live CD would also still work despite having been around a while they are still used.
Firstly you can 'start' a computer without a HDD. If by start you mean click the power and get a reaction. Of course you will get an error message telling you there is no operating system.
You can use a live CD and boot your favorite Linux distro. You can even use the computer and save files to a pen drive, all run from the CD.
If you where to make your external drive bootable and plug it in as a USB (boot the system from USB) then you could if you so wish.
3Yes you can boot a computer without a hard drive.
Many of my servers are Diskless nodes
You can boot from an external hard drive as long as the bios supports it (most computers newer than a pentium 4 do).
Besides an internal SCSI/IDE/SATA hard drive, you can start a computer from a live CD, a bootable USB stick, a bootable memory card in a USB memory card reader or IDE/SATA adapter, a bootable USB hard drive, a bootable floppy disk in a IDE/USB floppy drive, or netboot.
Also, SSDs are technically not hard disks, and you can certainly boot from one, as well.
