> You could mention what type of computer you have, as USB support > apparently differs widely. > > > I'm a little bit disappointed because I thought FreeDOS 1.4 was more > > advanced. > > FWIW, my experience is that USB works fine in Freedos without any > drivers on all computers I have tried, but the stick needs to be there > when you boot and you may have to have the appropriate settings in the > BIOS. > > /Tomas
To me the key question indeed is, what sort of computer Gabriel González is using. Good starting indicators: how old it is, what chipset / CPU. USB support in ancient machines was incomplete. The key point indeed is, support for USB in the BIOS. If the BIOS detects the USB disk drive, and makes it available via BIOS enhanced disk services at INT 13h, FreeDOS should work with the USB Mass Storage Device just as if it was attached via IDE/SATA/SCSI. To DOS, it is just another physical disk. Mind a tiny difference in two possible "formats" of the "USB disk drive": A) floppy style, with a FAT32 boot sector in LBA sector 0 of the physical disk (USB mass storage device) B) HDD style, with a MBR and a "legacy BIOS partition table" in LBA sector 0, and a partition declared in the partition table. You can actually create multiple partitions on a USB-attached drive, and FreeDOS will make them accessible to you. Just if you have multiple partitioned disk drives in the system, the sort order may end up "interesting": I believe DOS will take all "primary" partitions first, and only then any "extended" partitions will follow. The sort order of the drive letters assigned will go across your physical drives. Could it be that you're expecting your USB drive to appear as a HDD, while in fact DOS obtains it from the BIOS as a floppy? :-) How large is your USB-attached physical drive? If you have partitioned it, are you sure the partition table is of type "legacy BIOS" aka MBR, as compared to GPT ? GPT is UEFI-only and incompatible with DOS including FreeDOS. Actually there are people / authors of third-party software that apparently *can* use GPT in DOS: https://bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20615 but it's "outside mainstream" :-) And a note about hot-plug: Just as Tomas says, DOS with a BIOS underneath do not support hotplug of USB devices. The USB disk must be attached before the BIOS POST. DOS+BIOS do not support hot-swap of hard drives. DOS does support hot-swap of floppies, but I don't mean to imply that a "floppy style formatted USB mass storage HDD" will result in a hot-swappable USB device in DOS... a physical floppy drive and controller is a different matter, and a "USB floppy" is also a special class of USB mass storage device, expecting removable media (while the floppy *drive* remains attached to USB) = distinct from a "floppy style formatted USB mass storage HDD". You might achieve removable media using an SD/CF card reader for instance - I don't mean to promise that result though, I haven't tried this in DOS. Frank _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
