Hi there, On Mon, 23 Sep 2024, Orson Yancey via Freedos-user wrote:
... I have been working with the Panasonic USB drivers ... ... But the drivers are not robust. ... ... It would be a big plus to FreeDOS, if someone could locate or even develop USB drivers that are robust ... ...
I don't know if you've seen the drivers here: http://bretjohnson.us/programs/usbdos.zip but perhaps as important as the software itself is the file in the archive called 'USBINTRO.DOC'. It contains a lot of interesting (if perhaps dated) information which might help you. The drivers might be useful too. As yet I haven't used them but I plan to do that Real Soon Now... Today for the first time I've booted FreeDOS on a USB stick. It was very straightforward. The reason I did that was to copy a few hundred megabytes to a drive on a DOS machine. Until now I have mostly used a few floppies to copy data to the machine. I had a requirement to copy more data than was practical for floppies, so I imaged a USB stick to boot from, and, before booting the DOS machine with it I mounted it on my Linux desktop and wrote a 80 Mbyte Zip archive file to it. There's quite a lot of free space on a 512MByte FreeDOS USB boot image, plenty for this Zip file. After I booted with it I could extract the archive from the USB boot device to the hard drive of the DOS machine, which FreeDOS picked up without any problem and identified it as drive D:. The USB software which I was using was of course that which comes with FreeDOS in the USB boot device. In the short time (under an hour) which I spent on it, it seemed to behave well enough, although I did run into a couple of hiccups. While I did copy the data I needed, at one point the OS told me that there was an error reading the hard disc and then that the disc was full. The disc wasn't full, it had around 250MBytes free. At the moment I don't know where exactly the problem might be so I'll look into it more later. It's very possible that the old hard drive on this machine has a few bad spots. I'll give it some more work to do, to see how it holds up. I'll do some error checking too, using the data which I've been copying from machine to machine purely to calculate the CRCs - before and after copying the files, to and from the DOS machine. At any rate at the moment I have nothing against the USB systems that I've been using but it is very early days. The next step will be to install the Bret Johnson drivers on the MSDOS system (if they will support it, I don't even know that yet) to see if it handles USB sticks reliably. Then hopefully I'll be able to copy data via USB without first having to boot from a USB stick. HTH -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
