Hi there,
On Wed, 18 Mar 2026, tsiegel--- via Freedos-user wrote:
On 3/18/2026 1:01 AM, Ray Davison via Freedos-user wrote:
...
...
The install USB boots as C:\. I can switch to the HDD as D:\. I can
navigate the HDD.
Does the fact that the USB can boot, guarantee that the HDD can be made to
boot?
If you boot from the USB drive, all you need do is run the sys command, and
give it the drive letter of the hd, then remove the usb thumb drive, and the
hd should boot just fine.
sys d:
should do it in your case.
This assumes that the hard drive is working properly, of course.
If it's somehow broken, then all bets are off. I tend to test these
things first, doing something with which I'm familiar, before I take a
leap into the unknown with something unfamiliar. It's a pain to find
a fault which makes you realize that all that time you were barking up
the wrong tree. So I like to give the hardware a good thrashing first
with a setup in which problems are easily diagnosed.
Try connecting the hard drive using a USB adapter? For decades I
treated USB mass storage with great suspicion, because in the early
days I had many bad experiences with it. Nowadays everything seems
much more reliable and I mostly don't worry about it. I haven't done
a census but there must be at least a dozen USB-connected hard drives
around here doing everything from remote home directories to database
servers and from video recording to backup servers. We've had a case
for the last year or two where one particular machine would lose its
USB drive after somewhere between a couple of days and a week or two.
We swapped all the hardware, no change to the problem. Now it looks
like we've tracked it down to pipeweire processes hanging, if you can
believe that. I'm not sure I do yet, but it's now been up for almost
51 days so it's starting to feel like we fixed it with just a simple
watchdog on the errant processes.
--
73,
Ged.
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