what's so special about the way tinycore usb installer formats the device?

[yoshi314]

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?

[Juanito]

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/

[curaga]

Perhaps you forgot mbr.bin?

[yoshi314]

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.

Perhaps you forgot mbr.bin?

no, i did that too. i might have tried the _c and _f variants, though.

[tinypoodle]

If all you need is to access files on ext2 with freedos, you could look into ltools.

[yoshi314]

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.