Op 1-4-2012 18:22, Bob Cochran schreef: > Yesterday, I did a lot of work aimed at making a bootable FreeDOS USB > key. I looked through the FreeDOS website to find help for creating such > a key. Others on this forum have kindly helped me with creating a > bootable CD back in January; this time I wanted a bootable USB drive > with FreeDOS. The specific reason is to allow flashing of an LSI SAS HBA > controller card to what they call "IT Mode".
If you've got Windows, then the tool RUFUS ( http://rufus.akeo.ie/ ) is a nice starter, as it partitions and formats an USB Flash Drive and puts DOS on it (or something else, if pointing to an ISO file). I'm planning to release the next FreeDOS bootable CD-ROM image file as a so-called "iso-hybrid" file, which has no disadvantages to a normal ISO (except maybe size increased to nearest megabyte) but can be written to USB-drive (or harddisk) using a raw-writing tool like 'dd' that exists on Linux. The old way I created bootable USB keys was on Windows the HP USB tool (which RUFUS now replaces completely) or otherwise install syslinux to it, together with chain.c32 and kernel.sys / command.com / sys.com and a syslinux.cfg so Syslinux would boot FreeDOS after which I'd run SYS to replace Syslinux by FreeDOS bootsector. I think there's some FreeDOS bootsector perl-script for Linux as well, created by Eric Auer. > I would like to suggest that a link to making a bootable USB drive be > put on the FreeDOS website -- specifically the home page. This would be > a huge help to people like me. I ended up having to Google for > instructions, and found a download for a FreeDOS 1.0 usb drive. Interesting, got a link by any chance? ( http://bsd.ee/~hadara/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/dell_freedos-768x1024.jpg, also interesting) > Also confusing for me is that the description for the fd11src.iso on the > Download page says specifically, " Install only, does not include > LiveCD" but there is no mention of where a "LiveCD" download might be. > You might want to put a link on the Download page to the LiveCD. The older FreeDOS 1.0 included a Live section which I didn't keep for FreeDOS 1.1. I'll add it back sometime, and then the rest as the big FreeDOS 1.0 CD had, which was around 250MB. > I succeeded in flashing my LSI card with the help of FreeDOS. It turns > out that LSI does support the SAS2FLASH utility on several operating > systems, including FreeDOS 1.0. Also supported on several systems is the > MegaCLI utility. I am not sure if the Megarec utility is likewise > supported. It is possible I could have used SAS2FLASH on FreeBSD, but I > also needed Megarec, and I could only find a DOS version of that. So I > opted for using FreeDOS. No idea what all these LSI tools are. Specifically for flashing, there's also the flashrom tool (www.flashrom.org) that works on Linux and has a DOS port at http://ra.openbios.org/~idwer/flashrom/dos/ (thanks for making me look that up, it's been updated!). > I do hope that someone visiting the FreeDOS website will soon be able to > find quick instructions for creating bootable USB drives in addition to > the normal install directions. Jim Hall is working on a website change, hopefully he'll include your feedback. Bernd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF email is sponsosred by: Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d-msazure _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
