On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 10:51 PM joseph turco <italian.pepe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > i'm looking at installing freeDOS on an older (XP era) computer. I'm sorry > for my ignorance, but i'm trying to figure out usb support. I read somewhere > that USB drives are not read by the OS while it's already booted, but WILL > read USB drives if it's inserted upon boot. Is this correct? Many thanks > ahead of time. I plan to get a floppy drive for the computer (found one for > sale for 10 bucks) so that I won't rely on USB drives, but I need it to get > QBASIC on the system.
The issue will be FreeDOS. USB did not exist when DOS was the dominant PC OS. FreeDOS attempts to be an open source clone of MSDOS, so it does not have support for stuff introduced after DOS was dead. You would need a USB driver loaded in CONFIG.SYS to access the USB drives from FreeDOS. There is an attempt to create that, but I'm not sure about the current status. (It didn't work to access USB ports on a machine where I multibooted with FreeDOS as one of the OSes.). My memory suggests it needed support for a USB function not in that driver. That was a few years ago, and things may have improved. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
