Hi, Coming back to this, this might not be exactly the solution to this one specific problem, but I still feel like I should mention it somewhere!
On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 5:18 PM, Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > On Mar 25, 2017, at 5:00 PM, Aleksei Ivan <aleksei....@gmail.com> wrote: > > My USB ports are NOT working too. I have only to work with a installation > partition on this netbook. > > > Well, it is always tricky to install an OS to a computer with a single > drive, no USB, no CD, no Floppy. It is very difficult to boot anything other > than the installed OS. > > So, your only viable option is to remove the drive from the Netbook and plug > it into another PC. FYI, GNU's GRUB 2.02 was just released. I don't know the full changelog, but Phoronix says "better support for FreeDOS" (whatever that means)! An earlier article says "improved FreeDOS direct loading support"! * http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB2_Quick_Start A quick search for "grub freedos" found some interesting links: * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Flashing_BIOS_from_Linux * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/BIOS_Update * https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Bootable_DOS_USB_stick ... "The mkpkg action will create the floppy image ... so that the user can boot to the image from the hard drive to flash the BIOS, without needing a floppy drive." "The install action will create the biosdisk image, copy the image file to /boot, and then update the bootloader with an entry for the image. Then all the user has to do is boot the system and select the image to flash the BIOS; this will load the biosdisk image directly from the hard drive and flash the BIOS." It also has a section called "Images that are too large for a floppy" that grabs a 10 MB image from http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/ . That uses "mount -oloop" and says "The image can now be copied to a USB stick for booting, or booted as a memdisk". It also mentions genisoimage for adding 1.44 MB floppy image to .iso for CD/DVD. Or use the floppy image (as initrd) with GRUB via SysLinux's memdisk (as kernel). If needed, there's also geteltorito.pl that will extract .img from .iso, which can then be copied to "USB thumbdrive". ... The Gentoo wiki mentions fdboot.img and sys-freedos-linux. They create a 20 MB image (via dd) and mkfs.fat, sys-freedos.pl on it, mount -o loop, then copy files, etc. "Booting the FreeDOS image from GRUB directly" "To boot FreeDOS without any external media use the memdisk tool from syslinux to allow grub (or another bootloader) to boot the FreeDOS image directly." (Basically copy memdisk and freedos.img to /boot and adjust grub.conf accordingly.) ... The Bootable DOS USB (Gentoo) page is also interesting: They mention using dd, cfdisk, ms-sys, mkfs.fat. They also use DOSEMU (sys and xcopy) and test the raw USB device itself in QEMU. ... So, in short, it's still overly complicated, but there are ways of doing it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
