dbminter Posted September 5, 2011 Posted September 5, 2011 Inferring that the PC BIOS supports booting from USB drives, which mine does, can a USB flash drive be formatted to boot into DOS?
LIGHTNING UK! Posted September 5, 2011 Posted September 5, 2011 Of course. I only have 1 bootable USB stick that I use for everything. I made it ages ago using some HP tool.
dbminter Posted September 5, 2011 Author Posted September 5, 2011 I don't think I'll end up doing it. Either the easy solutions require (an admittedly small) fee to get the utilities, or appear to be to overly complex. I was thinking about having it as a way to access Q&A under DOS. But, the DOSBox way works, just requires some extra steps each time I want to run it. Trying to minimize it. I wish DOSBox had a macros type function in it for commonly used ASSIGN type commands. But, it doesn't as far as I can tell.
LIGHTNING UK! Posted September 5, 2011 Posted September 5, 2011 I believe I used this. Only takes a couple of clicks. http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197
dbminter Posted September 5, 2011 Author Posted September 5, 2011 That seems to have worked. I haven't actually tested it by booting and seeing if Q&A runs from it, if it even boots. But, I don't expect to ever need to test it any time soon.
dbminter Posted September 6, 2011 Author Posted September 6, 2011 Actually, as it turns, my BIOS does NOT support booting from USB flash drives! What was in my BIOS were settings from booting from "USB Hard Drive" and "USB CD/DVD." Apparently, a USB flash drive does not qualify as a USB HD because I tried booting from it and it didn't boot.
LIGHTNING UK! Posted September 6, 2011 Posted September 6, 2011 Your new Dell? It should do. Just press F12 on the bios screen and you should get a boot menu with a USB device option. If you have USB 3.0 (only) ports, avoid using them as they might not be bootable due to them being off a 3rd party controller.
dbminter Posted September 6, 2011 Author Posted September 6, 2011 There is an F12 boot screen option. I've never tried it before. I'll try to remember to try it someday. As for USB 3 ports, I've wondered about that. I believe the website for this model lists USB 3 ports, but, I've no idea which ones are 2 and which are 3. If there even are any 3, or any 2 and that they're all 3. I've no idea.
dbminter Posted September 6, 2011 Author Posted September 6, 2011 I'm glad you mentioned the F12 option. I'd probably have never thought about trying it. I tried it and there is a booting option for my USB flash drive when connected to the front left USB port. So, that one is probably not a USB 3 or it's not on a third party controller. So, there is the boot option in the BIOS; there just isn't an option for automatically booting from a USB flash drive.
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