Back to the stone age... making a boot disk!

[saverio]

Hello everyone,

Being a total GUI orientated child Gates and Jobs, I have hit a brick wall!

I need to flash some roms on a graphics card and a disk controller card, but both require the use of a 'boot floppy' (i'm adding that in quotes as this is totally alien to me!

I suppose this means some sort of ancient dos thing!

I've really tried against all odds to eliminate floppy and serial / PS2 devices from my life, and now I've achieved this, and my loft is far too dusty to be crawling around in trying to find such things again!

So, please could someone help me on this. Could I create this dinosaur relic on a USB stick, and if so, how does one go about it?

I tried making my usb stick bootable as I did in the wonderful thread on this forum to install RC1 and it worked a dream, but i'm guessing this isn't the same thing is it

Oh well... that's what comes from living in Steve Jobs land till a couple of years ago

Many thanks in advance from this utter boot disk virgin.

 

[mickey megabyte]

have you ditched your optical drives yet?

if not, you can download images for bootdisks here.

aha - there are also instructions for usb drives too!

happy booting!

 

[saverio]

no, I still have my optical drives, i'll take a look.

I have a usb floppy drive to hand, but I just remembered... I don't have any floppies !!

 

[DJG]

Check out Freedos:

FreeDOS | The FreeDOS Project

If you have a small (I use < 1GB) FAT partition Freedos will see it as a C partition. I dump all I need there from Windows and then boot Freedos and go to the C drive. Bye, bye floppy .

 

[mickey megabyte]

lol

good luck with the bootdisk site - it really is easy once you get started.

 

[DJG]

You just need the basic FreeDOS ISO image (8MB). Burn it to CD and boot from it, selecting Safe Mode rather than installing to harddrive. It boots DOS as if loaded from the A: drive. Type C: and run whatever DOS util you copied there - BIOS update, etc.

 

[bobkn]

I usually do the DOS stuff from a bootable USB flash drive. It was created by an HP tool that was helpful to the clueless (me):

HP Drive Key Boot Utility - HP Business Support Center

(45 MB download).

A good deal of stuff fits on an otherwise obsolete 256 MB flash drive.

(Of course, you must be able to boot from a USB flash drive.)

 

[DJG]

I tried some HP USB boot and it booted DOS alright, may or may not be the same. My problem was I needed something with absolutely NO drivers loaded, which FreeDOS provided. But that was a particular situation.

 

[saverio]

I found an old 1.44mb floppy!!!

So I created a dos boot disc using my usb floppy drive and rummaged around in the bios and got it to boot. So all is well once again. many thanks to all of you for all your help.