On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> I have such a USB stick. I was even able to find it. It is only 512 MB,
> because I made it a long time ago when that was the sweet spot for prices
> of USB sticks.

   I have (had?) a 128M one but cannot immediately put my hands on it. The
two .exe files are 2.8M each so space is not an issue.

> Now the trick is how to get it to you. I am in North Portland, but
> tomorrow afternoon I will go to PSU. If I recall correctly from previous
> conversations, you are extremely suburban. It might be cheaper

   I spent time futzing with the USB drive here and will test it tomorrow or
Thursday (depending on how much client work I get done today and how much of
tomorrow is getting around Frontier's blocking of outgoing port 25 even
though they're not the ISP but the copper between here and aracnet.

   Anyway, I used parted to remove all partitions on the stick. Then cfdisk
to make two partitions: /dev/sdb1 is vfat 32 (10M) and /dev/sdb2 is vfat 32
LBA (the rest of the 4G drive). /boot/initrd-tree/sbin/mkfs.vfat put the
file systems on each partition.

   Turns out that FreeDOS 1.1 lacks the bootable capabilities of 1.0. So I
downloaded dfbasews.iso and fdboot.img. The former has not been used, but I
used dd to copy fdboot.img on /dev/sdb1 (wasting most of the space, but that
doesn't matter at all). For whatever reason, I as user could not copy the
two BIOS files (*.exe) to /dev/sdb2, but root could. So, now I have
command.com, driver/, fdconfig.sys, freedos/, and kernel.sys in /dev/sd1 and
the BIOS images on /dev/sdb2. As soon as I can, I'll boot the laptop with
the USB drive (I think that kernel.sys is what's needed, then see if it
finds the .exe files to run.

More when I have it,

Rich
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