On Sat, Jan 15, 2022 at 6:33 AM Jerome Shidel <[email protected]> wrote:
> [..] > A lot of users want to run FreeDOS from USB. As I see it, there are > several issues with that. > > First, you cannot guarantee that when booted from USB that drive will be > writable. Personally, I’ve never seen when it was write protected. But, > during the early days of developing the installer for 1.2, I learned that > it was sometimes the case and attempts to use it for temp storage resulted > in the users machine screaming very loud beeps and throwing write errors. > So, the installer was modified and always assumes it’s boot media is > write-protected. > > Next, I don’t think users want a temporary Live Environment for USB usage. > They probably want the programs they install and the changes they make to > remain for next time. They also probably want the full capacity of the USB > drive. > > That is problematic. Without spending the time to write our own custom > “Write to USB” program, most will be stuck writing the standard USB images > directly too the USB media. I don’t see us making our own custom image > burner to stretch the filesystem for all the major OS platforms. So, that’s > out for the foreseeable future. > > Probably most systems will only do USB HD emulation when booted from that > USB drive (although I have some machines here that do it even when booted > from the HD as long as the USB stick is inserted), the best solution I’ve > come up with has been around for a while. More or less I refer to it as an > OEM style install. I demonstrated it in a YouTube video with FreeDOS 1.2. > Basically, you just write the USB install image to the drive. Then boot it > and exit the installer. Use FDISK to create a separate partition on the USB > drive and reboot. Because who knows what all drives are in the machine and > how they will be ordered, use FDISK to verify the drive letter. If its > drive D:, just run the installer again. If it is not drive D:, run the > installer in advanced mode and tell it the appropriate drive. Once install > completes, just reboot. It will boot into the installed partition. This > leaves the original installer boot partition as a “OEM” style recovery > partition. It also lets FDIMPLES use that recovery partition as a package > source to add and remove addition programs. Not a perfect solution. But one > I’ve used many times on internal hard drives and even USB sticks. > [..] Something I've wondered is if we really need the USB installer at all. Not as in "let's get rid of the USB installer for the sake of getting rid of it." I know that some people *do* use the USB installer (comes up in questions on Facebook and YouTube sometimes) but consider this: I run Linux, and use Fedora on my PC. When I download a new version of Fedora Workstation <https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/>, it comes as a DVD ISO image. But my PC doesn't have a DVD drive (my previous laptop didn't have an optical drive either) so I write the ISO image to a USB fob drive using Fedora Media Writer <https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/04/26/fedora-media-writer-the-fastest-way-to-create-live-usb-boot-media#how_does_it_work__>. I think you can do the same with Rufus <https://rufus.ie/en/>. It writes the image and makes the USB fob drive bootable. So my question is really: what about using Rufus to write the FreeDOS 1.3 CD ISO image to a USB fob drive - instead of providing a 32MB "Lite" USB image and a 512MB "Full" USB image. That would seem to be the easiest option, in my mind. It seems like it would be simpler to provide the LiveCD ISO image and people can write that to a USB fob drive with a tool like Rufus. Jim
_______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
