How to make flash disc bootable?

[Laaca]

Why I can't make the flash disc bootable by simple "sys f:" ?
(at least in FreeDOS, haven't tried in other OSes)

[Bret]

The ability to boot from a particular type of of disk is controlled by the BIOS. Doing a SYS F: will make the disk "bootable", but you can't actually boot from it unless your BIOS supports booting from USB disks. Many modern BIOSes can do this, but older ones usually can't. My programs do not control booting -- they only come into play after the computer has already booted and loaded DOS.

There are some other programs (like PLoP) that will sometimes let you boot from a USB disk even if the BIOS doesn't directly support it. I don't use any of those kinds of programs myself, nor have I ever tried to boot from a USB disk, so can't give you much advice other than that.

[robin78]

There is a serious bug in FreeDOS regarding FAT32 drives, which they will fix in a future release. I'm working with them now to try and find a work-around for USBDRIVE and older/current versions of FreeDOS, but haven't yet come up with a solution. I may end up needing to disable FAT32 support altogether for FreeDOS if we can't figure something out. In the mean time, I suggest you either use MS-DOS 7.10 or later, which works correctly with FAT32 drives, or use FAT16. FAT16 will will let you use disks up to 2 GB in size. If your disk is larger than 2GB, you can create multiple partitions each no larger than 2GB, which will each get assigned a different drive letter. Incidentally, some of the other DOS USB drivers will not work on disk with multiple partitions (and neither will Windows XP or Vista), but USBDRIVE works just fine.

[Bret]

What exactly is the problem FreeDOS has with FAT32? Is there anything that can be done in the next version of USBDRIVE to address it?