Re: [Freedos-user] Booting from USB
On Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:51:15 +0100 (MET), you wrote: Hi, >Hi guys, nice topic :-) I think a compatible list is better. Also depends on which manufacturer and what kind of device the BIOS. I've never seen a clear and detail announcement of how to make a USB bootable, even for Windows. Maybe someone can guide me to that kind of documents so I can try my own cheap cheap 128MB USB sticks. I think there're something like the boot sector on the flash, but any simple way to boot up from it directly? I need help also. Rgds, Johnson. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idv28&alloc_id845&op=click ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Booting from USB
Hi guys, nice topic :-) So Quentin wants to make a 256MB SanDisk Cruzer Micro or a 128MB Shikatronics bootable with FreeDOS, but got at most as far as the "FreeDOS" message. That means that the boot sector got installed but did not know the right partition properties like geometry (CHS case) or partition offset (LBA case)... - I'm using an Intel D865GBF motherboard Methods I have tried: - HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool - MBRTool from memorykeytools - Bart's MKBT using Weehet's method - makebootfat - Jacopo Lazzari's method, editing the partition table using Beeblebrox - The FlashBoot Wizard Wow, long list :-). I myself use my own Perl script which plugs a dynamically selected FreeDOS boot sector into a partition or diskimage of your choice. Boot sectors are taken from some version of our SYS and are in NASM source code form, so you will also have to have NASM (and Perl of course) to use my script. I do see that 256M Cruzer's can now be purchased for a mere 30 bucks... Actually the 512M one is 40 Euros now, even better :-). My own Cruzer Micro did boot FreeDOS including Windows 3.1 eventually, but there was some trickery involved. First, the stick came preformatted like a harddisk with one FAT32 partition on it. So the geometry and stuff were already stored okay (which is usually NOT the case if you format with mkdosfs of dosfstools, so you better format with Windows or DOS). Next, the BIOS of the test computer had several boot style options: ZIP disk, virtual floppy, virtual CD-ROM, harddisk, I do not remember what exactly the choices were. I think that for some of those modes your memory stick is supposed to start with a diskette image or ISO image in raw form. Anyway. In my case I finally selected a mode which treated the partition like a HUGE DISKETTE. It got the drive number for A:, it kept the geometry of the partition, but DOS only saw the partition, not the partition TABLE / MBR of the stick after booting. And it seems that the BIOS patched all necessary boot sector fields about the partition properties during boot :-). This is one general issue: BIOSes vary a lot in their abilities, flexibility and quality when it comes to USB boot support. When in doubt, try the SYSLINUX family of boot loaders and use that to boot a diskette image which you store on a file on the stick, using MEMDISK of the SYSLINUX family. Should work well. Do you have a Cruzer then? I've got a 1GB version... I've got a 256 MB version, FreeDOS booting works... But I am not sure how much I had to manually disk-edit the geometry. I only remember that I did use Linux fdisk to mark the FAT32 partition on the stick as a bootable one. Nice... So Michael has a 256 MB Lexar JumpDrive, you (Quentin) have the same SanDisk Cruzer as I do, Bernd has a bigger SanDisk... Time to grow the USB FreeDOS booting community :-). Oh, before I forget that, you can get my script (including Perl sources and NASM boot sector sources taken from FreeDOS SYS) at: http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~eric/stuff/soft/specials/sys-freedos-linux.zip Note that the CHS <-> LBA autoselection might be broken or the use of LBA might be blocked for A: style drives with some versions of FreeDOS SYS (the bootsectors in it, that is). Trying various versions of SYS in FreeDOS might be yet another way to get things done, completely WITHOUT external boot tools like HP / MBRTool / MKBT / makebootfat / Beeblebrox / FlashBoot / my Perl thing. Of course you will then need a DOS USB driver first before you can run SYS on the drive... I recommend USBASPI4 and ASPIDISK which you should be able to find on the net. ASPIDISK is the "create a drive letter for some ASPI disk" part of the Adaptec SCSI drivers for DOS, available from Adaptec, and USBASPI4 is a driver which gives ASPI access to USB disks in DOS. Enjoy :-). Eric --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7628&alloc_id=16845&op=click ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Booting from USB
At 09:28 PM 11/17/2005 +0100, Bernd Blaauw wrote: Michael Devore schreef: (I do see that 256M Cruzer's can now be purchased for a mere 30 bucks, but unfortunately between the new USB floppy drive for testing a laptop with EMM386 VDS changes, the TASM upgrade, and the Red Cross thing, my discretionary fund for FreeDOS is approximately 17 cents, at least through early 2006.) Do you have a Cruzer then? I've got a 1GB version, but BIOS probably will handle it as harddisk. No, I have a Lexar 256M JumpDrive that I use to boot FreeDOS. I would consider buying a 256M Cruzer to match the original posters' for testing, but that whole 17 cents, out-sourced loss of fat cushy contracts thing is a problem. Here I must specify the USB flash disk as a USB-ZIP for it to work in the boot sequence. USB-HDD, USB-FDD, USB-CDROM will not work. Later BIOS versions can directly identify a USB stick and, hopefully, work under their own designation. Actually, my wife has a 1G Cruzer like yours, but pointed remarks from that direction about not screwing up her cute drive by poking around its guts and possibly killing it have made me rethink the whole "surreptitiously borrow it in the middle of the night just to see what I can make it do" idea. best step seems to be to follow guides with MSDOS first, then try with FreeDOS, as some external tools might be specific to MSDOS (or its bootsector) Except I remember having to directly hack the loader image of my JumpDrive to get it to work as a bootable FreeDOS disk. So following the MS-DOS instructions may be insufficient for most. Or many. Or some. Or maybe just me. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7628&alloc_id=16845&op=click ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Booting from USB
Michael Devore schreef: (I do see that 256M Cruzer's can now be purchased for a mere 30 bucks, but unfortunately between the new USB floppy drive for testing a laptop with EMM386 VDS changes, the TASM upgrade, and the Red Cross thing, my discretionary fund for FreeDOS is approximately 17 cents, at least through early 2006.) Do you have a Cruzer then? I've got a 1GB version, but BIOS probably will handle it as harddisk. I've never tried to make it bootable, either with FreeDOS initially, or with Syslinux. There are many Linux-on-USB distributions, so I guess they'll have a tutorial for Syslinux or GRUB, or maybe even FreeDOS. WinImage 8.00 (and a few older versions) also claim support for bootable USB media. best step seems to be to follow guides with MSDOS first, then try with FreeDOS, as some external tools might be specific to MSDOS (or its bootsector) Bernd --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7628&alloc_id=16845&op=click ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Booting from USB
At 11:29 AM 11/17/2005 -0800, Quentin Liedtke wrote: I'm having a real tough time trying to get FreeDOS to boot from a USB flash drive and I'm hoping that the fine folks on this list might be able to help me. Hardware I'm using: - I'm using an Intel D865GBF motherboard with BIOS version BF86510A.86A.0075.P24 - I've tried booting from a 256MB SanDisk Cruzer Micro and a 128MB Shikatronics Hopefully someone on the list has a working solution for you. If not, I have an alternate proposal you might consider. Basically, I see more general questions off-list about booting FreeDOS and USB sticks than any other single issue nowadays. It appears to remain quite difficult to get a bootable stick working for many computer setups. And besides me, I've only seen a couple of people around mention that they have a FreeDOS-booting USB stick. So here's my offer to anyone on the list with USB stick problems booting FreeDOS: If you mail me the USB stick -- or an exact model duplicate -- that you are having problems with, I'll try to make it work here. If I can (or even if I can't), I'll mail the USB back with the bootable configuration, or whatever the last attempt configuration wound up being which didn't work. After receipt, the first step here will be to save the original bootloader image. I can compare that to the final working image to see what any magic differences might be. Second step is to try, as best I remember, to go through the process I did creating my FreeDOS-booting 256M JumpDrive. Third step, assuming success, is to see what can be done to make the entire process less painful and more likely to work for other people. Four step is to actually document the damn thing this time instead of trying to remember what bumbling about I did to get the USB stick to boot. Standard warnings apply: 1) Just because I can get it to boot here does not mean it will boot there. 2) The attempt could utterly fail, particularly if the USB stick is old or off-brand. 3) Those taking me up on the offer will have to spring for some stamps to mail the stick and obviously won't have it available to use while I work on it. 4) Umm, four, well I dunno, I suppose the mailman could accidentally run his white van over it, smash it into a million pieces, or I could die of sudden onset triple leprosy and have the stick cremated along with my oozing corpse. (I do see that 256M Cruzer's can now be purchased for a mere 30 bucks, but unfortunately between the new USB floppy drive for testing a laptop with EMM386 VDS changes, the TASM upgrade, and the Red Cross thing, my discretionary fund for FreeDOS is approximately 17 cents, at least through early 2006.) --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7628&alloc_id=16845&op=click ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Booting from USB
I'm having a real tough time trying to get FreeDOS to boot from a USB flash drive and I'm hoping that the fine folks on this list might be able to help me. Hardware I'm using: - I'm using an Intel D865GBF motherboard with BIOS version BF86510A.86A.0075.P24 - I've tried booting from a 256MB SanDisk Cruzer Micro and a 128MB Shikatronics Methods I have tried: - HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool - MBRTool from memorykeytools - Bart's MKBT using Weehet's method - makebootfat - Jacopo Lazzari's method, editing the partition table using Beeblebrox - The FlashBoot Wizard The best I have been able to do (using most of the methods listed above) is get my monitor to display "FreeDOS" or sometimes "FreeDOS FAT" and then stop. I know that I can boot a USB drive using the hardware listed above because I have been able to boot from both DOS 7.1 and Dr. DOS. Have any of you seen this "stopping" behaviour when booting from a USB flash drive? Please help me, Quentin. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7628&alloc_id=16845&op=click ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
