Crash: My most recent trials show that bootability is NOT necessarily a function of m/b-BIOS, nor AMD XP+ cpu. [I have a very large coterie of machines to check that one!]. Ditto readability/functionality. However, as I reported, WXP seems to confer some kind of reformatting capability - most strange for a non-DOS (or is it!!!) OS. A new suggestion is that many of these clones may be surplus or substandard strips with 'funny formats' to achieve greater size than intended. An old trick, in use since 8bit 180K discs used to run away with my monthly salary - sometimes, I could squeeze 240K of usable formatted space on them. Since then, an entire industry emerged around extended 1.44M formats, some of which caused physically damage to drives by jamming the heads against the buffers.
Probably all the commands to deal with these issues are present for CLI operators but are destined to remain a mystery to y.t. Nevertheless, U3 also sounds a likely candidate for confusion.
No Go with USB pen drive
I think the discriminator is really date of manufacture, not the type of processor. The manufacturers started paying attention to USB bootability only a few years ago. Before that, no one cared. So unless your hardware provider is diligent and releases updates to your BIOS, your computer may never be able to boot directly to a USB stick. I don't expect my K6-2 motherboard or my Abit KT7 motherboard to have a BIOS update soon, so I accept the fact that I have to push a floppy disk into those computers to boot up on a USB stick.
Concerning U3: There's good news and bad news. The good news is that it is going away soon. Sandisk is quietly removing this feature from their ads, still keeping the "Ready Boost" capability prominently displayed. This is because they struck a deal with Microsoft to have a "new and improved" version next year. I only hope that they include an uninstall utility with it. Many USB stick manufacturers advertise "Linux Compatible". I won't buy one if it doesn't say that.
Concerning XP: If you don't have XP, or just don't like it, you may know someone else who is willing to let you use their machine just for experiment. There may be one at the local computer shop that they may let you fiddle with. Some shop proprietors love to experiment with something new.
I haven't had any trouble lately with Puppy Linux and XP coexisting on the same hard drive, although I have reverted back to having Puppy on its own separate ext2 partition. I commonly download files to the XP NTFS partition from Puppy with no problems.
Concerning DOS bootability: The HP utility that I mentioned allows you to boot a floppy image of whatever you want. I have tried it with FreeDOS, DR-DOS, DOS 6.22, Win98 startup, you name it. It works really well. I even have a version of Wakepup2 on an SD card thanks to this utility (yes, one of the computers boots up right into an SD card - the floppy of the future?). The downside is you need Windows XP to use it.
Regarding the MBR: Puppy's Universal Installer gives you the option of putting on a new MBR as you go through its option screens. I find that the recommended one (mbr.bin) works fine on a USB stick.
Sage: You didn't mention what the type of USB stick you are using. The four that I have used are all Sandisk. I don't necessarily endorse them, but they are available everywhere and the lower capacity ones are getting real cheap. I even saw one ad that said "free after rebate"! Having said that, I am concerned about what Microsoft and Sandisk will do to this technology next year. Buy the old discontinued ones while you can.
Concerning U3: There's good news and bad news. The good news is that it is going away soon. Sandisk is quietly removing this feature from their ads, still keeping the "Ready Boost" capability prominently displayed. This is because they struck a deal with Microsoft to have a "new and improved" version next year. I only hope that they include an uninstall utility with it. Many USB stick manufacturers advertise "Linux Compatible". I won't buy one if it doesn't say that.
Concerning XP: If you don't have XP, or just don't like it, you may know someone else who is willing to let you use their machine just for experiment. There may be one at the local computer shop that they may let you fiddle with. Some shop proprietors love to experiment with something new.
I haven't had any trouble lately with Puppy Linux and XP coexisting on the same hard drive, although I have reverted back to having Puppy on its own separate ext2 partition. I commonly download files to the XP NTFS partition from Puppy with no problems.
Concerning DOS bootability: The HP utility that I mentioned allows you to boot a floppy image of whatever you want. I have tried it with FreeDOS, DR-DOS, DOS 6.22, Win98 startup, you name it. It works really well. I even have a version of Wakepup2 on an SD card thanks to this utility (yes, one of the computers boots up right into an SD card - the floppy of the future?). The downside is you need Windows XP to use it.
Regarding the MBR: Puppy's Universal Installer gives you the option of putting on a new MBR as you go through its option screens. I find that the recommended one (mbr.bin) works fine on a USB stick.
Sage: You didn't mention what the type of USB stick you are using. The four that I have used are all Sandisk. I don't necessarily endorse them, but they are available everywhere and the lower capacity ones are getting real cheap. I even saw one ad that said "free after rebate"! Having said that, I am concerned about what Microsoft and Sandisk will do to this technology next year. Buy the old discontinued ones while you can.
Yes, yes, and yes. I did mention that I have a cheap clone stick. For what it's worth, they claim to offer W98 drivers at www.vfuel.net, but those are the same files already pre-loaded and don't work with W98! Been down roads like that many times....
-
Bruce B
I finally made the flash stick ms-dos bootable. It is now drive C: on my otherwise non microsoft computer.
I did it with an ms-dos boot disk, fdisk and format. A first I was operating on the premise that dos wouldn't see a USB flash stick. So it didn't occur to me to try and set it up with ms-dos.
While it's true that dos doesn't natively see usb devices, it just happens that my motherboard does see it and at a low level sets it up sufficient for dos to have direct access and work with it the same as any hard disk.
I did it with an ms-dos boot disk, fdisk and format. A first I was operating on the premise that dos wouldn't see a USB flash stick. So it didn't occur to me to try and set it up with ms-dos.
While it's true that dos doesn't natively see usb devices, it just happens that my motherboard does see it and at a low level sets it up sufficient for dos to have direct access and work with it the same as any hard disk.
Well, when I saw this command
./syslinux /dev/sda1
from this thread:
http://www.slax.org/forum/viewtopic.php ... 249b979be5
my troubles were gone forever.
Can't tell what happened last time I installed Puppy 2.16 on two different kinds of flashdrives (One is seen by win2k setup as "hda1").
The sticks are dos-formatted (16 or 32, who knows); alway get them running with:
syslinux /dev/sda1 #(not mounted(?!))
sync
from some Puppy.
Cheers
./syslinux /dev/sda1
from this thread:
http://www.slax.org/forum/viewtopic.php ... 249b979be5
my troubles were gone forever.
Can't tell what happened last time I installed Puppy 2.16 on two different kinds of flashdrives (One is seen by win2k setup as "hda1").
The sticks are dos-formatted (16 or 32, who knows); alway get them running with:
syslinux /dev/sda1 #(not mounted(?!))
sync
from some Puppy.
Cheers
-
Bruce B
Thanks for the link. I read up on it and made a reply.
DOS formatted and partitioned does NOT prepare a USB Flash Stick to be DOS bootable. That's been my challenge here, which I've finally figured out.
The Linux formatting utilities write a fine FAT partition with a non bootable boot sector.
One of the reasons I wanted it MS-DOS bootable, was to run GRUB for DOS. Also, to have access to low level DOS utilities and other tools on the USB stick.
DOS formatted and partitioned does NOT prepare a USB Flash Stick to be DOS bootable. That's been my challenge here, which I've finally figured out.
The Linux formatting utilities write a fine FAT partition with a non bootable boot sector.
One of the reasons I wanted it MS-DOS bootable, was to run GRUB for DOS. Also, to have access to low level DOS utilities and other tools on the USB stick.
Well, Bruce, you've stumbled on a USB bootability diagnostic. I tried it on a few systems. If you use a W98 boot-up FD and select CD support, when a USB stick is present, the CD drive usually shows as "D". However if one tries to 'see', fdisk or format /s the invisible "C" drive and get 'invalid' luck has run out!
Sorry! On a short look haven't seen anything about a switch (HUB?)
Bruce B
The subject I took was installing Puppy on memorystick. Technically in the beginning when I used the stick only for data I also formated in win2k as fat with no problems. Then i got a shareware program with not much functions, but as I remember, and they mentioned ist, the dosfloppy-boot as on cd's was made with syslinux (i tried it).
Then I got the HP utilities -as told- and used them.
There was a good technically reason which I have forgotten to format larger usbstiscks (surely 1GB) as FAT32.
Switch: My BIOS recognizes the drives different (I only guess Floppy and HDD). When choosing one of the plugged ones, it takes the other!
Well, most of us understand the syntax of syslinux and grub, we hardly do them without confusing, so I use the given.
Puppies installer discusses "the mbr" and that was for me the point. Frugal install is only copying files, inclusive syslinux, ldlinux etc...
I only became accustomed to use: syslinux /dev/sda1; sync at the end of the installation. Fine Syslinux never failed then anymore.
That's my experience!
Cheers
Bruce B
The subject I took was installing Puppy on memorystick. Technically in the beginning when I used the stick only for data I also formated in win2k as fat with no problems. Then i got a shareware program with not much functions, but as I remember, and they mentioned ist, the dosfloppy-boot as on cd's was made with syslinux (i tried it).
Then I got the HP utilities -as told- and used them.
There was a good technically reason which I have forgotten to format larger usbstiscks (surely 1GB) as FAT32.
Switch: My BIOS recognizes the drives different (I only guess Floppy and HDD). When choosing one of the plugged ones, it takes the other!
Well, most of us understand the syntax of syslinux and grub, we hardly do them without confusing, so I use the given.
Puppies installer discusses "the mbr" and that was for me the point. Frugal install is only copying files, inclusive syslinux, ldlinux etc...
I only became accustomed to use: syslinux /dev/sda1; sync at the end of the installation. Fine Syslinux never failed then anymore.
That's my experience!
Cheers
switch : /s - system switch.
Well, the XP machine I have access to contains an MSI m/b. It is now telling me that my USB stick is "High Speed and you have no high speed USB ports". Really useful! I presume they mean USB 2.0. That's because MSI do not recommend their own BIOS upgrades because they can lead to permanent lost access. Wow, what sort of company is this. Besides which, XP is a damn nuisance with NTFS - it ignores stuff I set in BIOS. [But, then, so does Linux!!]. And I don't care for what is promised for BIOS in future, either.
We need to redefine progress: one step forward, you know the rest...
Well, the XP machine I have access to contains an MSI m/b. It is now telling me that my USB stick is "High Speed and you have no high speed USB ports". Really useful! I presume they mean USB 2.0. That's because MSI do not recommend their own BIOS upgrades because they can lead to permanent lost access. Wow, what sort of company is this. Besides which, XP is a damn nuisance with NTFS - it ignores stuff I set in BIOS. [But, then, so does Linux!!]. And I don't care for what is promised for BIOS in future, either.
We need to redefine progress: one step forward, you know the rest...