USB Booting

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: USB Booting
started by: robzulah

Posted by robzulah on Jan. 04 2005,21:02

I got this laptop from a family member for free, got it formatted and threw dos 7.10 on there for the hell of it and now I'm looking for an OS. It only has a floppy drive (less then four years old and no CD, go figure). All I have to boot from is a USB drive but when I go into BIOS and tell it to boot from there, it wont, it will just go straight to DOS, any ideas on how I can boot from that cd drive? I would kind of like to know if its possible before I blow 4 hours downloading DSL.

Posted by green on Jan. 05 2005,00:20

It must suck for it to take 4 hours downloading 50MB......

I've booted with a USB CD-ROM. My BIOS would allow that as an option. However, I had to enable USB keyboard and USB mouse in the BIOS as well. I've read a couple of other people had to do that as well. It's worth a shot.
Also, are you using a bootable CD in that thing? Have you tried the bootable CD in another machine to prove it works as bootable? You are going to blow away DOS at some point, correct?

Good luck.

Posted by robzulah on Jan. 05 2005,09:39

I know I'm going to sound like a total goober here...but we were all idiot newbies at one point werent we?

I havent even burned the ISO to CD yet, I only have one blank CD right now and wont get more for a week or two, so I wanted to make sur eI did it right. Now assumeing my laptop will boot from the CD drive, do I just straight burn the ISO to CD? Or do I need to do something special, like using a writing utility to write DOS images to a floppy disk.

Also, if I need to get a special program to burn the image to CD, what would you recommend? I'm stuck on an old Macintosh running Mac OS 8.9 (please dont hit me!).

Posted by green on Jan. 06 2005,04:10

For the record, I'm a noob goober too!

Burning the ISO to CD: There are a few options that will enable you to do that correctly. I use K3B, which is a Linux program. (tried Roxio, or whatever it is for windos at work) Since you use a Mac (no need to hit you) I really don't know. If you have any CD burning programs or utilities, poke around and see if they will "write CD image" with an ISO option. You can't just 'copy' the ISO to the CD, it doesn't work like that. The program or utility you use must know what to do with an ISO. Otherwise, you'll just make a neat little plastic drink coaster with a hole in the middle. I've made a few of those myself. Try searching the forums with "mac AND iso" as terms or something. Seems like I saw something like that some where but don't have a mac so I didn't log that file in the gray matter.

On another note, I would suggest using a CD-RW if you can get your hands on them. Even one or two would do you some good. I had about 3 for a while, and that saved me from making even more drink coasters. They cost a little more up front, but in the long run will probably save you a lot of frustration and a little cash since you can erase them and try again.

Good luck on your journey.

I'm hoping someone will welcome you to the R........ before I steal a line.

Posted by ke4nt1 on Jan. 06 2005,04:40

For the mac..

Roxio makes a program called "Toast" for mac cd burning.
If you have it, your in good shape..

Otherwise, as far as I remember, you can burn files to a disk,
but not iso images, as you'll only make a backup of your .iso file if you try.

There may be other utilities for the mac that do this,
but the roxio product is the only one I am familiar with in macland.

73
ke4nt