Alexey E. Suslikov wrote: >>> some BIOSes unable to represent USB-stick as ordinary >>> hard disk with real geometry. >>> >>> instead of it I see fd1 due "machine disk" with 1.44M >>> floppy geometry (80/2/18). >>> >>> I have tried to copy over floppy??.fs (which is in >>> 80/2/18 geometry) to USB-stick but it failed to boot. >>> >>> does anybody achieve some success booting using USB- >>> stick emulated as floppy? >> >> What kind of machine is this? > > i386 > > http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tomcati845gl.html > > BIOS 2.01
Oh..I figured this was some tiny laptop with no internal devices. Leads to a question about the point of this quest... >> "copied over"..how? >> (there's a lot of wrong ways. Few right ways) > > "dd if=floppy??.fs of=/dev/rsd0c bs=512" on other box > >> "failed to boot"..how? > > "Loading:." uh, I presume that's really a ';' and not a ':'. If not..something ain't right. (yes, that little stuff helps) only one dot...hmmm. ok, obviously it is trying to work. The boot sector is in the right place. Next thing I would try doing is to figure out if this has any HOPE of succeeding, by dd'ing an image of a DOS floppy to your flash device, using the same machines. If that doesn't work, OpenBSD is unlikely to fare much better. My hunch at this point is that the translation difference between the environment you are putting the image on the flash device and the environment you are expecting it to boot from is getting in your way somehow. Your flash device might not have any interest in working with the 80/2/18 translation -- that's not "normal" for how those things are used. You write the data using a more "normal" translation, and try to pull it out using something unsupported, who knows what actually comes off. Not sure how you could get around that, if I'm right, other than trying for some other solution to whatever problem you are trying to solve. note: This is all completely Wild A**ed Guesses. Much of the above could be wrong. :) Nick.
