[Sinned]

Hello everyone,

I'm busy with building my own OS for a while.
Now I should like to test this on my server machine, with a floppy as boot-medium.

The problem is just, the server machine doesn't have a floppy drive connector.
It only has:
- 2 IDE 40-pins
- 1 PCI
- 4 USB ports

I've read something about LS-120 drives, which could connect to IDE connectors.
But these things are quite expensive for my little project, so I would first consider other options.

There is an boot option on the BIOS of the machine which is called "USB-FDD", I don't know what kind of thing this is.
I mean, I don't think this is a USB Floppy drive, because those drives needs drivers installed on the OS, before connecting and there isn't a OS running before it has been booted.

So I have been looking and I found: http://www.geekalert...usb-floppy2.jpg
Is this the thing I need? Isn't this just handled as a USB-stick. (It doesn't fit in a floppy drive, so it isn't a floppy anymore, right?)

To come to the point:
Could someone give me advise how to boot my server, which has no floppy-drive connector, from an floppy?

Thanks,

Sinned

[modi123_1]

Can the machine boot from a USB thumb drive? You know newer-ish machines can do that... also why not just burn it to a cd and boot from that?

Plus that photo is just a usb thumb drive shoved into a floppy disk as a promotional item.. it is *not* a magical floppy disk to usb.

[Sinned]

modi123_1, on 18 February 2012 - 10:30 AM, said:

Can the machine boot from a USB thumb drive? You know newer-ish machines can do that...

No, it's an old machine.

modi123_1, on 18 February 2012 - 10:30 AM, said:

also why not just burn it to a cd and boot from that?

This could be possible if I only should do it once.
But what I have to do is: test, edit, test, edit, test, edit, test, edit, etc...
So this isn't possible.

modi123_1, on 18 February 2012 - 10:30 AM, said:

Plus that photo is just a usb thumb drive shoved into a floppy disk as a promotional item.. it is *not* a magical floppy disk to usb.

I was already supposing something like that, but it looked like an USB-FDD, so I thought maybe it could be it.

This post has been edited by Sinned: 18 February 2012 - 10:46 AM

[modi123_1]

If it's that old then it should have a FDD connector for a floppy drive and then you just buy one off ebay.

If it comes to the worst then twenty five bones gets you a spindle of a hundred CDRs... use the re-write option on a cdr to get a few uses out of it and stretch those hundred...

[jimblumberg]

Also don't forget about CD-RW disks are available.

Jim

[Sinned]

To come back to this old topic of mine. (It's still top list, and this problem goes on with it)

I've been trying many things to boot it.
Now I think: maybe I can boot it from CD.
But I don't know how to write sectors right to the CD.
With floppies I could just do:

dd if=boot.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

I can't do that with a CD, CD's need an ISO format or something ??

I don't know how to write my boot sector (512 bytes) direct to the CD.
I was hoping someone could tell me how to do this.

Thanks,
Sinned

[modi123_1]

A little light reading...

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/

[Sinned]

But... I read already something like that.
I thought this isn't where I was looking for...

This creates some sort of file system on the CD with some start-up .bat files ???
I just want to burn 1 sector of 512 bytes to the first sector of the CD. (The same as just burn 1 sector to a floppy)

At least I thought so.

It also returns an error:

Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> bin/mkisofs: Error - boot image 'cds\cdromsi\
files/cdrom.img' is not the an allowable size.
BCD: mkisofs.exe returned an error...
BCD: Aborting, removing ISO file "C:\Users\Dennis\AppData\Local\Temp\bcd.iso"
BCD: Aborted...

(C:\Users\Dennis\ is my home directory, I'm Dennis)

This post has been edited by Sinned: 08 March 2012 - 09:27 AM

[modi123_1]

Yeah - well you really don't write a cd like you would a floppy disk.

[Sinned]

I made a boot CD working with Nero ROM 11.
I can just insert the (assembled) .bin file. (bootloader)
And it burns it directly to disk.

I know it's not the best method, because I simulates an 1.44 MB Diskette. (So the maximum capacity is 1.44 MB)
But it works for now.

[modi123_1]

There ya go!