flash drives in dos

[gokuhama]

I was wondering if flash drives appear and are accessible in DOS. Thanks!

 

[ohnnyj]

I wouldn't think so since most are USB based and unless there is a DOS driver for it I don't think its going to show. I could be wrong as I don't own one myself.

 

[phisrow]

Depends on how they are connected. If you have a compactflash card connected to the IDE bus it should show up just fine. One of the old school SCSI or parallel readers may or may not work, depending on drivers. If you are referring to the basic USB connected flash drives, you are certainly out of luck with default configuration. If, however, you are feeling daring, try http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm or http://www.stefan2000.com/darkehorse/PC/DOS/Drivers/USB/ .

 

[Zepper]

There is no native USB support in DOS except for whatever support your BIOS provides - usually just basic mouse/kbd functions. Some BIOSes have support for booting from a USB device but once the boot starts, the OS has to take over from there.
.bh.

:moon:

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that if the BIOS is new enough, it can treat USB flash drives installed at boot time as BIOS-accessable (Int13h) fixed disk drives, which DOS can then access normally. That implies that they are non-removable during your DOS session though, and have to be partitioned, etc.

Some flash drives include utilities that allow them to change how they identify themselves to the system, as a USB removable/vs fixed storage device, etc.

There are also ASPI drivers for DOS for USB (generally used for external USB CD-ROM drives), and I *think* (not entirely certain), that they may support USB flash drives as well. In terms of being able to access/format them then, you would also need an ASPI-disk driver, and an ASPI-disk formatting utility.

I should really try experimenting more with this, I'm a bit curious myself. I've read that some people have been able to install and boot Win98se off of a USB flash drive even.