booting from floppy/cdrom->usb

[thuned]

I have an older computer equipped with USB, but can't boot from USB. I have an external usb hdd that I want to boot from (2ndary OS). Is it possible to boot from the floppy, then proceed to boot from the usb hdd? Or even better, can I make a bootable cdrom that does this (booting off an interal ide cdrom)?

I also want to use this as something like a tech support device. So I might want multiple OS's on it (eg 98, 2k, xp).

I understand there's probably 2 parts to it; getting dos usb drivers and linking the boot process. Can someone help me out with this?

 

[Rav3n]

Nero Burning Rom can make an image of a bootable floppy disk and burn it onto a CD. Once you have this, you will probably need a utility to place on the floppy (drivers) to get the comp to recognize the USB HD, and then you can boot from it. My suggestion - go to the companies website that makes the HD and look for a tool that will do this all in one shot. If they dont have one, email their tech support. The other thing you might want to try is flashing your BIOS because MAYBE the maker of your mobo decided to be nice and release an updated version of the bios so you can boot from USB devices 🙂 Good luck.

 

[Zepper]

Hey thuned,
Ever heard of Google??? He helps those who help themselves...
. Only Phoenix BIOS ver.4 rel.6 and up (and some of the latest Award too, because they are the same company now) supports USB boot. Which you can't depend on having on a clients machine. You can boot to DOS and load DOS USB drivers and have access to the data, but not boot.
. So generally speaking, booting from USB devices isn't supported. To do what you want to do, it would be better, cheaper and faster to use a removable drive rack. For a diagnostic drive, you would want to have a FAT-16 partition as boot for widest compatibility and make it less than 2GB so it will work with most older BIOSes that you'll run across.
.bh.
Where's the :sun: ?