At 11:15 AM 2/23/2006 -0500, Mark Bailey wrote:
My BIOS on THIS computer auto-detects the USB stick and presents the boot option as: USB-HDD0: ...
Okay, I figured out what was going on with my computer. No errors in the kernel, although the build setup needs a couple of minor tweaks to successfully compile under FreeDOS with Watcom 1.4.
My current USB sticks are always being formatted as floppies, ignoring the media byte status. What was confusing me was two things: first, because I use BootMagic to boot off the hard disks into XP or FreeDOS, BootMagic will hide different hard drive partitions by changing the File System byte. Depending on what the last boot was with BootMagic, either XP or FreeDOS, I would see different HD partitions on a USB stick boot. Confusing as hell until you figure out what is going on.
The second problem was the kernel I had before on the original bootable stick did not display the warning message for CHS values. Consequently it all looked wrong after the kernel update. Since my hard disks use a non-LBA FAT32 file system value of 0BH even though LBA is used, the new kernel warning messages were triggered. However, the FDISK message doesn't show because FreeDOS detects the forced LBA later in the kernel code after displaying the warning, and handles things properly. Guess it's my disk's partitions fault for being set to file system type of 0BH instead of LBA FAT32 value of 0CH, but I'm not ready to change them and potentially annoy BootMagic (which would probably just change them back again anyway).
I tried a bunch of different utilities and was -- finally, and oh too briefly -- able to format my stick as a hard drive using DFSee. With the USB stick formatted as a hard drive, I was able to boot it as a C: drive using USB-HDD boot selection. Even there, all the partitions showed up correctly, and FreeDOS knew there were 3 hard drives instead of 2. It was nice while it lasted.
Unfortunately the hard drive formatting was lost soon thereafter, perhaps due to an ill-advised SYS. Or perhaps there really is low-level corruption going on with a hard drive stick. I can't convince DFSee or anything else to make the USB stick a hard drive again to keep testing.
Final score is FreeDOS kernel 1, Michael 0. Things work as they should under my normal conditions of the stick being considered a floppy. As for a hard drive,I can't replicate the conditions necessary to make the stick act like one, and the testing moment when it acted that way was too brief to do much in the way of debugging.
If there are any suggestions on how to force the USB stick back to partitioned-style hard drive status, I'm open to suggestions. Otherwise, things work well enough I don't have anything to debug.
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