I would want to find out if there is any common ground regarding USB Stick formatting and having access to a second USB Stick when booting FreeDOS from a first USB Stick.
Does anyone around know if BIOSes in general differentiate between »floppy drive« or »hard disk« because of an existing MBR (or partition table) or not? Or is this true?: > It is also known that a BIOS can treat a 256MB USB drive as a floppy drive, > but a 512MB USB drive (that contains IDENTICAL contents), as a hard drive > (the BIOS interrogates the USB drive for it’s physical drive size and from > the size returned it determines how it should map the drive)." > and / or this: > Before a BIOS loads the data (code) from the first sector of a USB drive and > runs that code, it has to decide how to ‘map’ that device to the standard int > 13h BIOS call that all boot code uses. > If the BIOS decides that the USB device is a floppy device, the BIOS will > respond to ‘floppy drive’ int 13h requests (i.e. DL=00). If the BIOS treats > the device as a hard disk type, it will respond to ‘hard disk’ int 13h > requests (DL=80h). If the BIOS treats the USB device as a ZIP device, it will > respond to access requests as a floppy (DL=00) but it will translate any > request such that a request for Sector 1 (LBA0) will return the PBR of the > device, a request for Sector 2 will return the sector after the PBR and so > on. Thus to any real-mode (DOS) OS, the USB ZIP device will appear to be just > like a big floppy disk with no MBR or reserved sectors. (Quotes from: https://rmprepusb.com/tutorials/027-diagnose-how-your-bios-boots-usb-drives/#google_vignette ) Thanks if anyone has a knowledge of this info. Is it obsolete/outdated? Thomas _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
