Last night I picked up a few off-brand 128M USB sticks and tried formatting
them to boot FreeDOS on my system. As a pleasant surprise, the latest
FORMAT 0.91v and SYS from 2/20/2006 32-bit kernel formatted all three
brands to FreeDOS-bootable sticks -- although each received a runtime
FORMAT message "GDP default BPB read error 0F" which didn't appear to
affect anything. Much different experience than my last mucking around
with boot images and disk patches to get a bootable stick; good job
everyone involved in upgrading the FreeDOS capabilities there.
Since USB booting of FreeDOS remains an issue for several people, I'd like
to send the sticks to any volunteer who has failures booting a modern
FreeDOS-format USB stick, or doesn't have a USB stick available, to test
how/if it works. I'll cover the postage to send it, you simply have to
e-mail me your address. You can mail it back after you are done or, if
shipping costs are substantial, you can keep it, although obviously I'd
prefer to get the stick back to pass on to other testers. Simply drop me
an e-mail. Details on the offer follow...
The requirements are that you have a 386+ (probably a Pentium+) machine
with a USB port and a BIOS that supports booting from a USB stick. On my
test system that means selecting USB-ZIP, other systems may have a boot
selection called USB mass storage, and more recent BIOS setups may be able
to directly identify the USB stick as a boot source while it's plugged
in. The stick will most likely come up as drive A: when it boots.
What I want to know is whether the boot works, what you had to specify in
your BIOS to get it to boot, what type of machine you have, and anything
else which seems notable. The sticks are formatted FAT16 and have no
CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT, although I have included the latest versions of
HIMEM.EXE and EMM386.EXE if you have time to test booting with HIMEM and
EMM386 active (if it boots OK without them loaded and not with, that's
important news to know).
If you already have a good booting stick, I may be interested in your
machine's information for comparison purposes.
For future tests I may check FAT32 format, plus see what might be possible,
if anything, to get a stick booting under other USB selections, e.g.
USB-FDD, USB-CD ROM, and USB-HD here, and/or move to a different default
drive from A:. But for now I want to establish we have happy boots for
basic USB stick setup.
If you have any questions, drop me an e-mail or post here as appropriate.
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