Dear Mr. Ramos, > - Balena Etcher > - Rufus > - Untebootin > - Win32DiskImager.
interestingly to me, you don't mention the trusty old `dd` ... :-) Have you tried looking for a BIOS update? I have, but the HP support website does not respond to the "Presario 427" search query. Maybe it would respond to a "product code", if that label on the underside of the machine is still readable. In the video linked below, there's a motherboard partnumber N14JP6-V2, apparently shared with "HP Compaq 420", for which there is still some historical support (a BIOS available for download) - hard to say if this would fit your laptop or brick it. The Presario 427 seems relatively modern, but could be an oddball, especially if it shipped with Linux. By the time this product was released, Presario was a budget line under HP, a decade and a half after the merger of Compaq with HP. The 427 might be specific to a particular "sales region" on the globe. And, name-brand machines are not unknown to have peculiarities in the BIOS, especially if they are local oddballs, of which the brand disclaims responsibility on a global scale... Hmm. Looking at this screen: https://youtu.be/Ymro4opGIKI?t=119 So... you're saying that the USB stick does not appear on offer? Mind the line "USB Key Drive BBS Priorities" at the very bottom. Only in this video, the boot mode is configured to "UEFI only", so it's not a good example. Do you have more than one USB mass storage device plugged in, by any chance? :-) As for booting from USB mass storage: by the time your Presario launched, booting from a USB stick had been available in the BIOS for well over a decade - now with all the bells and whistles, I'd say. Apart from USB CD/DVD and Floppy, i.e. speaking only of physical "USB hard drives" (USB mass storage in HDD mode), I know of two styles of how the medium can be laid out: A) as a hard drive, i.e. having a legacy BIOS MBR + partition table B) having just a single filesystem all across the surface, i.e. the FS boot sector is in LBA sector 0 (= where the MBR is in var.A). Also known as "floppy layout" (not to be confused with a native USB mass storage floppy). Veteran FreeBSD folks would call this the "dangerously dedicated" layout. Perhaps your BIOS makes a difference between these two variants? :-) Most modern BIOSes don't. I recall in Award 6 series BIOS, on some desktop motherboards, there was a SETUP option for you to pick what to expect on the hard drives: MBR, "floppy" (dangerously dedicated) and "auto" - where Auto was the default and would never give me a problem. Also, in the "partitioned" variant (= A), the partition start/end offsets are aligned with some ultra-legacy structure of Cylinders/Heads/Sectors. There actually used to be at least three schemes in the ancient days (nineties), often called "CHS, LBA and Large". (The modern fdisk variants trying to align to 2048 sectors per track, rather than 63, is a mere benign deja vu.) However bogus these alignment schemes are, on non-fossil ATA/LBA disk drives and USB Mass Storage, I still remember an era when BIOSes made a fuss about this alignment making sense, i.e. you had to pick and match the right one for your BIOS - but that era ended maybe a decade prior to the birth of your Presario machine... I've also seen my "mouseclick-happy" colleagues "write an ISO image onto a USB thumb drive", often using Rufus - not sure if Rufus does just a verbatim block copy of ISO image onto the USB Mass Storage LBA address space, or it dissects the ISO and copies individual components onto the USB thumb drive which it duly formats (i.e. if Rufus knows enough about the layout of modern Linux distro installers to rehash them in this way). My guys next door actually do this with Windows installer ISO images too, I believe... might also work owing to the UEFI boot sequence, not sure. One last question/topic maybe: The BIOS in the video (linked above) appears to have a small USB options menu, where you can enable/disable two ports individually. The machine originally came with Linux. Do you still have Linux in the box? Or, can you boot some Linux installer? Basically some kind of Linux instance that would tell you, if it can see your USB thumb drive or not. The one you're trying to boot FreeDOS from. Should be visible in dmesg and /proc/partitions. What does Linux fdisk or sfdisk tell you about the thumb drive? Can you boot other operating system installers from the thumb drive? No ready-made recipe, just my two cents worth... Frank > > Thank you Bob and @Norby Droid. > > I am aware of that, I didn't just copy the files to the USB stick. As > I was trying multiple methods, I used a variety of programs to > generate the half-a-dozen bootable drives that I tried. I used: > > - Balena Etcher > - Rufus > - Untebootin > - Win32DiskImager. > > I'm starting to think there's something wrong with my USB drives. I > have a bunch but they're not exactly new. > > @Norby Droid mentioned floppy images... but I can see it is very > small and I won't have internet on that machine. I tried flashing the > legacy ISO but the tools say it lacks boot capabilities. > > On Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 6:30 AM Bob Pryor via Freedos-user > <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > Post ls -l of your usb drive. > As Jim mentioned, you can not just copy the .img file to a formatted > usb. > You have to burn the image to the drive to make it bootable. > JP > > > On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 11:27 PM Jim Hall via Freedos-user > <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > To confirm, you're trying to boot the USB installer: > > https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions > /1.3/official/FD13-FullUSB.zip > > > I assume you unzipped this and wrote the image to the USB flash > drive using the right tool, and didn't just use Copy to get the file > to the drive? (I'm asking because that's a common mistake.) > > You will definitely need to use Legacy mode to boot FreeDOS. Legacy > provides a BIOS which FreeDOS needs to run. > > When you booted, did you have the USB flash drive already plugged > into the computer? Remember that DOS doesn't understand USB per se, > so you can't plug/unplug the USB flash drive after FreeDOS has > booted. > > > > On Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 10:29 PM Davi Ramos via Freedos-user > <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > So, as I said in another message, I have a computer where I wish to > install FreeDOS. It is a Compaq Presario 427, Intel Pentium N3700, > 4GB RAM, SSD 240GB, and a 14" screen. > > Unfortunately, I cannot get it to boot the installation media. I have > tried numerous USB flash drives as well as an SD card. Forcing it to > boot takes me back to the bios screen after a few seconds. When I > change the boot mode to "Legacy", than the flash drive simply > disappear. To the bios, it's like it doesn't exist. > > I'm not sure what the etiquette of sending files to a mailing list > is, so I uploaded the images with all the settings available on my > computer's bios. Maybe that will help. I've tried a bunch of > combinations but nothing seems to work. I was capable of booting into > antiX Linux, so it is not as if the bios won't boot anything. > > These are the images of the bios: https://imgur.com/a/pw8xJBS > > Thanks! > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
