Hi Michael:
Very interesting. I am a naive user here. How do I
tell if my USB sticks are formatted as floppies or
hard drives? Is this a function of FreeDOS or
WindowsXP format? All my sticks have an MBR
in the first 512 bytes. Are you saying that
yours do not?
Also, what is the "media byte" status? Is this
the "media descriptor" at offset 15h in the FAT32
boot sector?
Also, does the machine in question have a floppy
disk drive?
Mark
Michael Devore wrote:
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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