Hi Michael,
What I want to know is whether the boot works, what you had to specify
in your BIOS to get it to boot, what type of machine you have, and
anything else which seems notable.
I posted my experience of bootable USB in an earlier thread (see below).
One other thing to note; I only achieved fully stable USB booting by
using UMBPCI; Microsoft's EMM386 under MS-DOS, and FD EMM386 under
FreeDOS were highly unstable (last tested Oct05).
-- From Earlier Posting --
The BIOS is the first thing to check. All recent Dell servers and
Optiplex desktops above GX270 can easily boot FreeDOS from a USB stick.
Earlier Dell models can boot using a BIOS upgrade. The Dell BIOS not
only has USB emulation but it even has F12 with a menu item to choose
the boot device; hard drive, CD-ROM, USB memory stick. You can also
choose if you want floppy emulation or "hard disk" emulation so it's
very flexible.
Many makes of computer older than three years can NOT do this. Even if
the BIOS has an option for "emulation", this sometimes is ONLY for mouse
and keyboard!
After you've checked you're running a modern computer with USB bootable
BIOS, one solution is to get a working FreeDOS floppy, load it into
WinImage (even if you have to use it unregistered) then "write" the
image to the USB device - at this point WinImage will "extend" the image
so that it's no longer 1.44Mb. You can then add lots of new files, edit
FDCONFIG.SYS etc. I've only ever tried this on a 16Mb memory stick and
I'm pretty sure you end up with FAT12, but it certainly works. I never
tried it on high capacity memory sticks and anyway it would be a bit
silly as FreeDOS only needs a few KB.
Dell also have a utility for their Flash drives that will turn them into
bootable "DOS" drive, but I think it uses Win98 boot sector and IO.SYS.
-- End From Earlier Posting --
--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)
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