USB boot on non-supporting machines

[aismike]

Bret,
thanks for developing the USBDOS package: hell of a job indeed !!!

While I'm still waiting for a decently performing USB stick driver (the current one is
kinda unusable on my old Siemes PC at present ...), I'd like to suggest youu to think about
a (working ...) little program (to be loaded from CD or floppy disk) to allow booting from USB
sticks/disks on old machines that do NOT support USB booting, similar to PLoP Boot Manager
by Elmar (which isn't currently very reliable ...). In case you don't know it:
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

Thanks for a GREAT package !!!

Michele Montagni

[Bret]

That's not something I'd be interested in doing myself, though somebody else could take what I've done so far as a starting/reference point and create some sort of USB boot manager. The only thing is, it would need to contain the same licensing as the existing programs, which includes publishing the source code (which PLoP doesn't currently do).

Even though disk drives seem to be the main thing that people concentrate on when it comes to USB, USB is so much bigger than just disk drives that I don't want to get "stuck" there. My intention is to create highly functional drivers for the common USB devices that people need, and will let other people pursue making the drivers "better" (more features, support of non-standard or uncommon hardware, etc.).

[aismike]

Bret,
thanks for your quick and kind reply.

Too bad you're not interested in it: with the knowledge you have of USB, the excellent
code you have already written and the expected size of such a program, I suspect you
could put out a working boot manager in a day or two.

I still think it would be a perfect complement for your package.

Thanks anyway.
Best wishes,

Michele Montagni

[gopup]

To: Bret

Is it possible to boot dos using the USB Driver on these computers to control a boot manager and linux distirbution that is found on a USB drive or Compact Flash media on a USB Card Reader?

ie. Bios uses Floppy disk or CD to dos with the USB Drive. The dos configuration is preconfigured to find the USB Media and complete the tasks to run a boot manager on the USB Media. There may have to be ram drives setup with files copied from the USB Media into these ram drives to complete booting of the linux desktop on the USB Media.

Is this type of approach feasible?

Is there a better alternative?

Was thinking of using Gugin as the boot loader on the USB Drive Media. This is an open source boot loader that boots allot of operating systems, but lacks USB support.
http://gujin.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gujin/

Look forward to your reply.

[Bret]

It seems like something like that could be possible. I know that the Panasonic USB drivers come with a utility called RAMFD.SYS, that lets you boot from a USB floppy, then images the floppy to a RAM drive of sorts, then lets you remove the USB floppy and replace it with a different USB (flash) drive.

It seems like it would be possible to load some sort of boot image into RAM, and then issue something like an INT 18h or INT 19h and boot whatever OS you wanted. I've never tried this, so don't know what kinds of technical issues you would run into.

Of course, this doesn't address the issue of booting at all in the first place.