Hi Pierre :-) > 1> How can I use my USB flash drives in FDOS? I checked my CMOS > settings. 'Legacy USB' support is enabled, but when I tried accessing > the flash drive in FDOS, it wasn't available. I'm assuming, once > working, I would be able to use it as a floppy? This would allow me > to put files on my modern PC.
As somebody already replied, you could make a bootable USB stick with DOS. Then the BIOS will play the driver for DOS. Note that you cannot plug the stick in or out after booting in that case. Sometimes the BIOS even makes USB disks visible as harddisks if you do NOT boot from them. But you still have to reboot whenever you plug another stick, I think. The other option is to use USB drivers for DOS. At the moment, the Bret Johnson drivers ( http://bretjohnson.us/ ) are a common choice, as they are free and open. There are also shareware DOS drivers, even with USB 3.0 high speed support, by Georg Potthast ( http://www.georgpotthast.de/usb/ ) which only work for a while after each boot until you register them. Both drivers have the limitation that not all mainboards / chipsets are supported. You can also download a number of older, commercial drivers, which usually came with some hardware but often also work with other. > 2> I'd also like to be able to burn files to my optical drive as > opposed to only reading from it. Is there an app to burn files to CD > from FDOS? This also would allow me to put files to my modern PC. Burning files to CD / DVD / BluRay is hard in DOS, because you need "stronger" drivers for your (e.g. ATAPI or SATA) drive. Some people have collected commercial drivers which you could use with DOSCDROAST or similar toolkits, with the same problem as using old commercial DOS USB disk drivers. If you find a safe way of using USB sticks, that is probably the solution with less headache. Memory cards such as SD in USB readers also count as USB stick in that sense, and might actually respect the write-protect tab on the card for you. Built-in card readers may or may not behave as USB readers. Note that you can even plug CF memory cards to IDE connectors with simple mechanical adapters. Every operating system and BIOS should accept them as harddisk replacement that way, of course again without the ability to plug them in or out while DOS is running. Note that speed of all sorts of flash sticks or cards is bad in typical DOS use, because DOS does not pool writes and does not usually read-ahead. The latter can be fixed by loading lbacache with the tickle tool. Or you can load uide which is a very big cache. Both only work for BIOS supported drives, they will not notice drives connected with separate drivers. Neither will pool writes, though. Because flash storage is often low in "writes per second", you get slow writes with DOS. Other operating systems do few-but-big writes. If your disk is SSD, you can forget most of those "but" items, SSD are flash disks which are very fast even with bad drivers. Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. This 200-page book is written by three acclaimed leaders in the field. The early access version is available now. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/neotech_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
