Re: [Freedos-user] Any volunteers interested in testing USB stick booting?
Hi Michael: I received a sealed envelope from you yesterday. It contained a card with a note about a white cover but no USB stick! :-( Did the stick fall out or something? Jeremy is making progress! If I receive a stick, after I test it do you want me to put an MBR on it? Very easy to change the formats from MBR to superfloppy in Linux. I don't know how to do it easily in Windows or DOS. Mark Michael Devore wrote: 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. --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=103432bid=230486dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any volunteers interested in testing USB stick booting?
At 09:27 AM 2/28/2006 -0500, Mark Bailey wrote: Hi Michael: I received a sealed envelope from you yesterday. It contained a card with a note about a white cover but no USB stick! :-( Did the stick fall out or something? Ha, if there's not a hole somebody nabbed it. And it was worth a whole $10, probably $3.00 resale value. Welp, I have another one I can send, although I'm having my own problems with the USB sticks. Seems now I can only make them format as hard drives, rather than the original problem of only floppies. Once changed, format-type is tenacious. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any volunteers interested in testing USB stick booting?
Michael Devore wrote: At 09:27 AM 2/28/2006 -0500, Mark Bailey wrote: Hi Michael: I received a sealed envelope from you yesterday. It contained a card with a note about a white cover but no USB stick! :-( Did the stick fall out or something? Ha, if there's not a hole somebody nabbed it. And it was worth a whole $10, probably $3.00 resale value. Welp, I have another one I can send, although I'm having my own problems with the USB sticks. Seems now I can only make them format as hard drives, rather than the original problem of only floppies. Once changed, format-type is tenacious. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user As a postal worker for 22 years, I will tell you with certainity that if you use an envelope to mail it you made a mistake. Every post office that processes mail and some that don't have a collection items that should never have been mailed in an envelope. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any volunteers interested in testing USB stick booting?
At 03:46 PM 2/28/2006 -0600, charlie_chan wrote: As a postal worker for 22 years, I will tell you with certainity that if you use an envelope to mail it you made a mistake. Every post office that processes mail and some that don't have a collection items that should never have been mailed in an envelope. Strictly a risk/reward ratio consideration. Pay 60 cents to mail a $10 item I don't need and take a slightly higher chance of its loss, or pay $4 to support a nicer packing solution which would almost certainly get there intact. USPS is, overall, fairly reliable and it was worth the risk. That said, as you may know, within the past decade the USPS Chicago metro area was considered one of the worst in the nation for its speed of delivery and lost piece count. That may have changed for the better after several public expose's on the subject, but perhaps I should have factored that status into the equation, as well. If I did it again, though, I'd turn the card opening towards the bottom of the envelope. --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=110944bid=241720dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any volunteers interested in testing USB stick booting?
Hi Michael, 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. I posted my experience of bootable USB in an earlier thread (see below). One other thing to note; I only achieved fully stable USB booting by using UMBPCI; Microsoft's EMM386 under MS-DOS, and FD EMM386 under FreeDOS were highly unstable (last tested Oct05). -- From Earlier Posting -- The BIOS is the first thing to check. All recent Dell servers and Optiplex desktops above GX270 can easily boot FreeDOS from a USB stick. Earlier Dell models can boot using a BIOS upgrade. The Dell BIOS not only has USB emulation but it even has F12 with a menu item to choose the boot device; hard drive, CD-ROM, USB memory stick. You can also choose if you want floppy emulation or hard disk emulation so it's very flexible. Many makes of computer older than three years can NOT do this. Even if the BIOS has an option for emulation, this sometimes is ONLY for mouse and keyboard! After you've checked you're running a modern computer with USB bootable BIOS, one solution is to get a working FreeDOS floppy, load it into WinImage (even if you have to use it unregistered) then write the image to the USB device - at this point WinImage will extend the image so that it's no longer 1.44Mb. You can then add lots of new files, edit FDCONFIG.SYS etc. I've only ever tried this on a 16Mb memory stick and I'm pretty sure you end up with FAT12, but it certainly works. I never tried it on high capacity memory sticks and anyway it would be a bit silly as FreeDOS only needs a few KB. Dell also have a utility for their Flash drives that will turn them into bootable DOS drive, but I think it uses Win98 boot sector and IO.SYS. -- End From Earlier Posting -- -- Gerry Hickman (London UK) --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnkkid=103432bid=230486dat=121642 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
