NO Floppy USB Boot Help

[bjdobs]

Does anyone know the details of how the USB devices are supposed to be set up for them to be bootable?

I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 and a verbatim 128M USB drive ... the Dell doesn't come with a Floppy, has a boot to USB option ... the Verbatim has a utility to take a floppy image and copy to USB ... doing both results in the old DOS message can't fiind file system and press any key to continue.

The Floppies and HD's require a boot sector something that cannot be achieved by just doing a file copy from A: drive ... Does the USB process need a boot sector or is it in the USB bios?

 

[allteltec]

What OS are you trying to boot. I have a Sony vaio XP home no floppy so i got a USB floppy, I was very surprised when I left a win98 boot floppy in the UBS drive and it boot win98 from the USB floppy of power up. You will have to have a boot image on the usb drive to get it to boot. If you are win98 you could use dos sys command.
sys c: e:
this would trafer a copy of the system files from boot drive c: to drive e: if e: is your usb drive.
I kown i have tryed to put a gost image of win98 on a lap top drvie useing a laptop usb drive and it would not work.

 

[bjdobs]

HP has a utility supplied under their D530 product drivers that formats USB Drives and will copy a user supplied io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com ... I used an ME startup disk and it worked 1st time.

I guess the only other wish is that MS would now provide a stand alone NTFS dos kernal/command shell. I presme this wasn't possible in a 1.44 Mb floppy but with a USB drive this should no longer be an issue.

 

[ceh4702]

If a USB Floppy or boot from USB does not appear in the boot order in the BIOS, the that is not possible. Not all motherboards are specifically bootable from USB devices. Most motherboards are bootable from CDROM, if you could make a bootable CDROM, you might be able to put the drivers on that.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[AthlonPower]

If you BIOS doesn't support booting from the Floppy via USB, then it's best to create a bootable CD. I've had a pain trying to do this, but I finally created a bootable CD by downloading a floppy image of the Win98 Boot Disk and burning it to a CD using floppy emulation.