OK, so I've been given a USB floppy drive with a disk in it containing 
some BIOS utilities. Which works - after you enable booting from it in 
the BIOS. But it's not exactly "fast".

My plan? To convert this into a bootable CD or maybe a USB drive. But how?

After much Googling, I discovered that there's an option to mkisofs 
which makes it to El Torito floppy emulation. So I can basically take a 
raw disk image of the floppy (which is only half full anyway) and make 
an ISO-9660 CD image out of it.

So I booted up a VM running Debian Squeeze, and... mkisofs isn't a 
recognised command? Seriously? OK, well maybe I just need to install it. 
Er, no, the package manager claims to have no knowledge of any such 
program. Wuh?! There /must/ be a way to install this, surely? Don't tell 
me the mighty Debian doesn't support something as common as CD burning...

Well, Squeeze has /nothing/. But checking Lenny, I find a package that 
at least /contains/ the binary. Except it isn't a binary, it's just a 
symlink. The package documentation says "This is for compatibility only. 
Please use genisofs instead."

OK, so for some reason they've renamed a standard Unix tool to another 
name. But with identical functionality. Um, whatever. (Isn't this from 
the guys who bought us Iceweasel, which is identical to Firefox?)

So, I ask genisofs to build me a CD image. First it complains that I 
haven't added any files. Which is fair enough, I suppose. So I create an 
empty folder, and tell it to use that. But now it complains that it 
can't find the floppy image - even though it's /right there/!

Eventually I hunt through the manpage, and in the small print I discover 
that the floppy image has to be /in/ the folder that you're making a CD 
out of. (Presumably it shows up as a regular file on the disk, in 
addition to being the boot code. Or something.) Once I moved the floppy 
image, everything worked fine. And you know what? The CD boots and works 
perfectly.

So now the guys from the USA can have their USB floppy drive back. I've 
got a CD. ;-)

I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work? I 
rather suspect not. I've never actually seen any PC boot from a flash 
drive, ever - although I keep hearing that it's supposed to work...

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On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:35:22 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work?

Yep.  Use isohybrid to get it working.

I do this quite regularly with openSUSE ISO images in order to boot from 
a USB flash drive instead.  Installs are *much* quicker.

Jim

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On 27/02/2012 16:53, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:35:22 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>
>> I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work?
>
> Yep.  Use isohybrid to get it working.
>
> I do this quite regularly with openSUSE ISO images in order to boot from
> a USB flash drive instead.  Installs are *much* quicker.

The seek time on a CD drive /is/ rather poor. I find that when I install 
stuff onto a VM, using an ISO image on a networked file server, it runs 
/way/ faster than if I really did put the physical CD into the local 
machine's drive and run it without any VM overhead.

So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the 
ISO image to the flash drive? Or do I have to /do/ stuff to it first to 
make it work?

Also, is there a quick way to test whether a particular PC even 
/supports/ booting from flash? Like I say, I've never seen it actually 
work IRL. Is there some easily available image I can test with?

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On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:15:13 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the
> ISO image to the flash drive? Or do I have to /do/ stuff to it first to
> make it work?

You have to use isohybrid to make it work.  Try a google search as that 
should tell you what it does and how to use it.

Jim

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On 2/27/2012 6:35 AM, Invisible wrote:
> I wonder... would copying the CD image to a USB drive actually work? I
> rather suspect not. I've never actually seen any PC boot from a flash
> drive, ever - although I keep hearing that it's supposed to work...
Had to do precisely that to install a new copy of the Linux for the EePC 
I installed a new, bigger, SSD drive into it. So, yeah, you can, but not 
all of them can be formatted to be booted, and the BIOS needs to support 
the ability to boot from USB devices.

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On 2/27/2012 3:01 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:15:13 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the
>> ISO image to the flash drive? Or do I have to /do/ stuff to it first to
>> make it work?
>
> You have to use isohybrid to make it work.  Try a google search as that
> should tell you what it does and how to use it.
>
> Jim
Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages 
of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.

Looking over one of those pages, you are actually doing:

1. Format
2. Partition
3. Copy over the needed files (or install to it, I supposed).
4. Make it bootable (presumably the same way you do an HDD, but marking 
the partition as "live".

This makes it looks like a normal HDD to the system, as long as the 
system recognizes USB as a boot option.

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On 28/02/2012 10:02 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages
> of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.

Someone probably has a ready-made script to boot Linux from a flash 
drive, probably using Grub. But I'm trying to boot MS-DOS. I imagine 
that's going to be harder. (USB didn't /exist/ when MS-DOS was written, 
after all...)

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On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:01:02 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> On 28/02/2012 10:02 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> 
>> Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages
>> of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.
> 
> Someone probably has a ready-made script to boot Linux from a flash
> drive, probably using Grub. But I'm trying to boot MS-DOS. I imagine
> that's going to be harder. (USB didn't /exist/ when MS-DOS was written,
> after all...)

Did you read the *isohybrid* info like I've suggested *twice* now?

Jim

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On 2/28/2012 6:01 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 28/02/2012 10:02 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> Or, just a search on, "make usb flash drive bootable". Pages and pages
>> of ways to do it, most of them Linux based, but some others.
>
> Someone probably has a ready-made script to boot Linux from a flash
> drive, probably using Grub. But I'm trying to boot MS-DOS. I imagine
> that's going to be harder. (USB didn't /exist/ when MS-DOS was written,
> after all...)
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

Gives a number of examples, some of which are "basically" what I said 
before. But, no, its exactly the same process. As long as the stick has 
been formatted, and set up, to be bootable, it doesn't care, any more 
than the system does, that its a flash drive, instead of an HDD.

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On 2/27/2012 12:15, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> So, uh, anyway... Can I literally just do a block-level copy from the ISO

Do *not* do a block-level copy to a USB stick if you ever want that stick to 
ever work again.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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