I'm not entirely sure if this is possible (seems like it would be)....

I have heard that hard drives can be emulated using RAM, along the same lines would it be possible to load an OS from RAM? Maybe have an image of an install of the OS and load it into ram from another OS or special boot util? Would probably have to be a very light config of linux....

anyway assuming that it could be done and the OS loaded from ram, with all data also being stored to ram, once the system was powered down would there be any way to reconstruct the data?