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Author Topic: what's so special about the way tinycore usb installer formats the device?  (Read 3151 times)

Offline yoshi314

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I accidentally formatted my usb device.

So, i made a single bootable fat32 partition, gave it a boot flag, installed syslinux on it, verified that ldlinux.sys is there, restored my syslinux configs and other boot files and...

- one computer gives me a "Boot error"
- other computer refuses to notice the usb device, until it starts booting off hdd (it does not show up in bios boot menu, but it's detected when looking at bios messages).
- works in qemu (but qemu is very fault tolerant :/ )

After a while of looking for the problem, i gave up. I reformatted the drive with tinycore usb installer (standard USB-HDD mode format) and ... it started working again.

It looks like tinycore makes a fat16 partition, and zeroes the first 1mb of the device. Is it really what i was missing or is there more to it?

Offline Juanito

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Not an answer to your question, but why would you format the usb drive fat and not ext2/3/4?

The ext2fsd freeware drivers for windows seem very stable now, I've been using them for ages without errors:

http://www.ext2fsd.com/
« Last Edit: May 02, 2011, 03:32:11 AM by Juanito »

Offline curaga

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Perhaps you forgot mbr.bin?
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.

Offline yoshi314

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Not an answer to your question, but why would you format the usb drive fat and not ext2/3/4?

The ext2fsd freeware drivers for windows seem very stable now, I've been using them for ages without errors:

http://www.ext2fsd.com/
well i think freedos needs it to be fat-based to access it.

Quote
Perhaps you forgot mbr.bin?
no, i did that too. i might have tried the _c and _f variants, though.

Offline tinypoodle

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If all you need is to access files on ext2 with freedos, you could look into ltools.
"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." Niklaus Wirth - A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

Offline yoshi314

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there is a small observation i made when device was still not booting right - it would initialize very slowly, with few seconds delay.

after reformatting with tinycore installer it starts up instantly and even an old computer i could never get to boot off any usb now works with it!

it could be that the chip on the flashdrive has issues with certain filesystems, but i have no clue why would that be.