Rudy, you can always use a Linux Boot CD/DVD as most of them do exactly what you describe above ?!!

If I understood your question properly, that is what you are looking for !!!

Try SUSE or Ubuntu as they are my favourites !!!!

Linux Rocks !!!

“Not terribly fast” would be a giant understatement. The OS hits the disk constantly under normal operations and the difference between an “average” disk drive and the fastest DVD drive is still huge. The system would probably be so slow as to not be usable. Also, keep in mind that although a RODC does not replicate its AD out that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take in new updates. So you couldn’t put the AD database on the DVD anyway (there wouldn’t be a way to write updates — unless with was a RW-DVD which would be even slower).

In fact, you couldn’t put any files on the DVD that are updated or that have their configurations changed. Plus you would have to burn a new DVD in order to apply any patches or updates. So, all that is left to put on the DVD would be files that never change. Those files would be the standard executable files that come on every Windows installation and therefore do not require any security. Good thinking though, just not something that would work for a Windows Server Installation.

Next, someone will ask about the OS on a USB drive. Now, we’ve got the ability for proper updating, but again, very very slow. Keep in mind that the applications you can run off of removable media are loaded into RAM and run from there due to the speed limitation. So, although you can run something like Firefox off a USB drive the reason you need a special version is so that most everything needed to run the program can be uploaded to memory with only the permanent data written back to the USB drive. Something like Server 2008 is too big to do this with.