booting off of Sandisk Cruzer Micro

yggdrasilos · 01-25-2005, 01:05 PM

I've got several Win98 and 98SE bootdisks laying around. Would those work, or is there something special about HP's disk image?

creeble · 01-25-2005, 01:08 PM

Should work, but you need the io.sys and msdos.sys hidden files too. Let me know if you can't find them, I can send them to you.

Eric.

ZaphyR · 01-25-2005, 03:04 PM

i tried to use the HP tool, and it seems to have done what it should. i have command.com, io.sys and msdos.sys on my USB...but it wont boot...
does that mean that i never can boot from this usb pen?

creeble · 01-25-2005, 03:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by ZaphyR
i tried to use the HP tool, and it seems to have done what it should. i have command.com, io.sys and msdos.sys on my USB...but it wont boot...
does that mean that i never can boot from this usb pen?

Either the pen or the computer. Your computer needs to be set from USB-HDD (not USB-floppy). If it can't boot DOS from a suitably-formatted (by the HP utility) stick, then in my experience either that computer or possibly that stick are not going to boot anything (off the stick).

Eric.

ZaphyR · 01-25-2005, 04:21 PM

i looked around in the BIOS settings, and found something called "USB Device Legacy Support", which was disabled. so i enabled it for all devices and now it boots from the usb pen to DOS.
i have these boot option in BIOS
1. USB HDD
2. USB FDD
3. USB CDROM
4. USB LS128
5. USB ZIP
and it is booting from both 2 and 4, i have not tested the others.

so now on to getting linux on there as well

ZaphyR · 01-25-2005, 04:59 PM

now i have extracted Feather Linux on the usb pen, and ran "syslinux f:" in windows.
the usb pen will only boot when BIOS is set to boot LS120. I have tried USB HDD and USB FDD without luck.
anyways, when it boots all i get is the first splash screen with Feather logo, and it says "press F2 for boot options" and so on...and there it freezes! nothing happens, it does not respond to any keyboard inputs...

creeble · 01-25-2005, 05:07 PM

As I mention earlier in this thread, I could never get syslinux.exe to work. Yours seems to be doing something -- you get the splash screen -- but it's either not finding the kernel or there's some other problem.

Try the steps I did a few messages back -- dpkg-get, apt-get install mtools, then syslinux /dev/sda1 under *linux* (while booted from a CD). This was the *only* way I could get the stick to boot (note that I had to format it with the Windows-based USB tool first, then the rest I did while feather was running from CD).

Eric.

beechwood · 06-02-2005, 07:23 PM

Not sure if this info will help anyone, but I too could not get my Cruzer Micro 512MB to boot - kept hanging with a flashing white underscore and black background, needed a hard reset to access the machine again. This was distressing as a 128MB version of the drive worked great. I couldn't figure out what the heck the problem was. I finally configured the device as drive C: (was emulating diskette A: ) and booted from a Win98 boot disk. Then I ran fdisk and selected "View the current drive" -

It showed one partition, C:, active and primary, with a size of 489MB. The next line stated the total drive size was 486MB. So how can a partition exceed the size size of the drive? Quite simply, it can't! So I deleted the partition and created a new one, which happens to be 100% of the disk size, 486MB. Guess what? Boots every time. I guess Sandisk is at fault. As far as I can tell, the drvice leaves the factory with a MBR/partition table on it. Doesn't help the hapless consumer to give them a corrupted one. Too bad it took me so long to figure this out. But heck, it always feels good to get something working.