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I sometimes disconect my harddisks for the weeks while only using the internet and I use the Ubuntu Live CD. But every time it needs something while in live desktop it accelerates and makes a lot of noise, also the acceleration takes too long. I want lower drive speed than acceleration lags, because acceleration lags stop me completly exactly when I need something.

How can I lower the CD drive speed, say to maximum 16x, without restarting? I can't restart because I only use the CD drive, no harddisks, no flash disks, no network disks.

Edit:

No USB drives.

Setcd does not work for the live session.

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why don't you use Ubuntu installed on pendrive? – Paweł Karpiński Nov 11 '10 at 22:43
i am not buying pen drives until they will get to 2$ for 4 GB... – iugamarian Nov 11 '10 at 22:50
also my bios does not support booting from USB because of seven year old computer with upgrades, not to the mainboard – iugamarian Nov 11 '10 at 22:54
You're using a CD. You don't need a 4GB drive to counter that. You can get a 1gig stick for £1. They're often faster than the CD too. And you can boot to USB via a floppy. I assume it has one of those if it won't boot USB. Edit: USB 1.1 is slightly slower than a 16x speed CD but it still has much faster seek times. – Oli♦ Nov 12 '10 at 1:03
Ok, I am buying a USB drive and will use plop as my floppy drive has failed some years ago (it was a Sony). Thanks. – iugamarian Nov 12 '10 at 7:42

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

well, if you don't want to buy a pendrive, do the following lines:

sudo apt-get install setcd
setcd -x 1

Change -x 1 to -x [number]. Higher the number, faster the drive.

But you should remember, that CD works on high speed for a reason. Ubuntu may become slow, when you do that.

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I can optimise for best results: speed vs access time. From my experience 16x is the best optimisation. – iugamarian Nov 11 '10 at 23:03
setcd does not work for the live session - no effect not even with sudo setcd – iugamarian Nov 11 '10 at 23:09
well, it seems to have some effect... the cd stops faster from throttling :) thanks – iugamarian Nov 25 '10 at 19:52
up vote 1 down vote

The easiest thing to do is use the supplied USB creator tool or Unetbootin to create a bootable USB drive, which is exactly the same thing as using a Live CD, only without the drive noise.

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And the hardest thing to do if you do not have large USB drives. My biggest one is a PQI of 1GB but it has a USB 1.1 speed. – iugamarian Nov 11 '10 at 22:47

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