How to make a bootable compact flash

We can send you a 8M CF with opendos (freedos?) on it. You just have to pay for $5 shipping.

Thanks, that is a good offer. Who are "we" and how do I get the CF? Also, I would like to know how to get the necessary program to make a bootable CF via a sandisk USB/CF interface running on winxp.

There is no "x" in my email address.

You don't want to sys through USB, since the boot device would be incorrect. We use IDE-CF adapter to sys from floppy. That way, the boot device would be same as running from your PC104 (hopefully, primary master). You might have to try secondary master. However, if your board can boot from either CF, perhaps it does not matter. Dos is not as picky about primary vs. secondary. If you only need to do it once, then we can just send you the CF. If you need to do it more than once, then you should get the adapter as well. See:

Do you have a drive letter for the CF in WINDOWS? If so, assuming the CF is on G:, use FreeDOS sys (from a bootable FreeDOS floppy in A: for example) and just do "sys g:".

If you don't have WINDOWS and only Linux, you might get something out of DOSEMU, if you set things up right.

Right,

MartinS

How windows map the drive is completely irrelevant.

The OP has USB drive, FreeDOS knows nothing about USB at all. You must be running FreeDOS to "sys".

That will map into the linux drivers (IDE or FDC), which will carefully protect the user from messing up the boot sector.

Yes. This is the crux of the entire problem.

In order to use -ANY- peripheral device connected to a USB port from true DOS, you -MUST- install a third-party, DOS-based USB software driver.

True DOS knows nothing about USB ports, and can't access them without a driver.

There are several USB software drivers available for DOS. Try one or two, until you find one that recognizes the presence of the USB drive.

Google for 'USB + DOS' (without the quotes).

Once you've installed an appropriate DOS USB driver, it will then be necessary to partition, format, and sys the USB drive.

Make certain that you do this with the O.S. that you'll be using on the drive. Don't try to do it with a Mikro$loth product.

Frankly, I wouldn't fsck around with FreeDOS at all. DR-DOS version 7.xx is free, is much better than FreeDOS, and is a hell of a lot more stable.

Have fun!

Unless your BIOS supports USB drives, in which case no drivers are needed. Most newer machines do include BIOS support for USB mass-storage devices, and can even boot from them.

Its worse than that. My laptop runs winxp and does not have a floppy drive. For some reason the iso image does not boot from DVD/CD. But even if it did, freedos does not know how to use usb to get to the flash drive.

winxp does not allow me to access the "hard drives" hidden areas, so the freedos sys command does not work under the dos console for winxp.

So with winxp I can copy files, but not make the cf bootable. I have to start with msdos, and use the freedos sys command. However, I have apparently hit a bug in freedos where it boots but does not load config.sys or fdconfig.sys. SO I am stuck.

Thanks, Steve

There is no "x" in my email address.

Do you have access to a desktop, or do you have to do this on a laptop? Again, it depends on whether you are doing it once or many times. We can either send you the CF or the adapter for you to do it. Once you have the bootable CF, you can sys and/or copy another from the PC104 board.

Even if it does, you will sys the XP system files and crash with the rest of freedos. You have to boot from a clean freedos to "sys".

Same problem, you have to boot from freedos, not msdos. You are mixing apples and oranges.

I believe you. I have loaded freedos on 8M CF from 5 floppies. You can't mix any files with msdos or windows, since they have the same file names very often. That's why our highly skilled engineer have to charge you $1 per floppy (for swapping and waiting).

Hi, I don't know why a desktop PC will help, and in any case I don't have a desktop with a cf reader. I have the files "extracted" from the floppy images on the iso CD.

I agree, if I have one good cf I can clone it all I want.

Why is this true? If I boot msdos, change to the c: drive for freedos, change my path for freedos....SYS works, and does set up the system to boot freedos. I do have to make sure command.com is the freedos one, not the msdos one. Sys is just a dos program that does physical writes to a media, right? The new drive does boot, and seems to run freedos OK. The only problem I have not overcome is that it is not loading either config.sys or fdconfig.sys while freedos is booting.

I will gladly pay you for a CF, tell me how (maybe email me?). Have you checked to see if your version actually loads stuff from config.sys, when booted from the CF?

Thanks for the suggestions.

There is no "x" in my email address.

Sys is building the new io.sys and dos.sys from the running system. In this case, you will be building a msdos boot images with freedos command.com

Yes, we load drivers from config.sys. I will send you a paypal request.

I don't see how this can be true. Sys pokes through executing memory and figures out how to write a fresh io.sys and msdos.sys? How could it do that. Also sys for freedos has to know where kernel.sys is for it to succeed. And I think kernel.sys is the replacement for both io.sys and msdos.sys.

I do not know where the bootstrap code comes from, especially if this was a newly formatted CF drive. I would guess that it was built into the sys executable?

I am sure that you are right, if I could boot from freedos and write the CF from freedos, it would be what you have which apparently works. What I have been trying to do (and document) is how to boot from another dos and make a freedos bootable disk. I have not succeeded.

Thanks for the help, and please email me so I can buy a bootable CF from you..

There is no "x" in my email address.

No it isn't. I dare say you haven't ever used FreeDOS SYS.COM. It sure puts KERNEL.SYS on my floppies and not MSDOS.SYS or IO.SYS.

Right,

MartinS

All I am saying is that we downloaded 5 floppies. Boot from the floppy and installed it on our IDE-CF adapter with 8M CF. If you don't believe me, check our customers' review on ebay (search for IDE-CF) or go to our web at: