I know that many here in this forum have worked with USB devices so I thought I'd ask this here.

I have half a dozen or more USB Flash drives that I've made bootable with the little HP program.
I've even done it with a SD flash card.
All of my older FD's boot into an A: prompt.

But, I just formatted a 1 gig FD from "Mediamate" in the normal manner and it boots up to a C: prompt.  That won't work!!!  I need the A: prompt to run Ghost 2003 or 2005 from the FD and make a bootable Ghost backup DVD.

Any ideas why this new FD boots to a C: prompt?
Could it have something to do with the 'size' of the FD? (Size matters?) ;D

I'm stumped.

The Shadow  8-)

All USB devices belong to a "device class"; flash and hard disks belong to the "mass storage" device class.

In addition to that, there is a "subclass" which defines more specific capabilities, and in particular which commands the device has. The main subclasses are oriented around things like hard disks, things like optical media, things like tape, and things like floppy disks.

Flash storage aren't any of those things, and don't have a particular USB storage subclass for themselves.

So, it's entirely up to manufacturers which of them they choose to present themselves as. Since originally most flash media was a) small-capacity and b) slow, most manufacturers decided that the most appropriate presentation was as floppy-type media. This meant that most OSes which encountered the device didn't put an MBR on them and no partitioning happened.

Now that capacities and speeds are much higher, some manufacturers are making the opposite choice and tagging the device as using one of the command sets associated with hard disks. They also tend to end up partitionable as a consequence.

Thank you Nigel,

That sort of, kind of, almost, possibly, is along the lines of what I was thinking.  Sort of. ::)

I guess that I'll have to use the smaller mb flash drives if I want to make them boot to A:.

The 1 gig FD thinks it's a hard drive.   :'(

Thanks,
Shadow

I'm sorry if this is obvious but I'm not clear on the situation...

Have you tried using the command "cd a:" to change to the A: prompt?  Or the command "dir" to see if the files you need are listed under C:?

Aaaaaaa. it's a flash drive that thinks it's drive C:
there is NO A: drive unless you put a floppy in the drive.
That would totally defeat the purpose of booting from a flash drive.

The idea of using a flash drive instead of a floppy is because NONE of the new PC's today even has a floppy drive in it.

The problem is evidently IN the flash drive and the way it was made.

Thanks,
Shadow  8-)

I'm not sure of the problem with it showing as a C: drive.  You did check the directory listing to see if the files you needed are there?

All the files are there and Ghost works GREAT!

The problem is, that on the drive there are a whole bunch of batch files, that refer to drives A: and C:.  Without some major reworking, they just won't work the way they are supposed to.
Then when I run Ghost to make a bootable DVD, Ghost can't find the boot files on A: where it's programmed to look for them.  It won't accept them from any other drive letter.  It's A: or nothing.

At this point I'm thinking that I'll have to just use drives of 512mb or less for this purpose.

Some things are just NOT fixable.  I can deal with that.

Thanks,
Shadow  8-)

TheShadow wrote on Mar 8^th, 2008 at 8:46pm:

Some things are just NOT fixable.  I can deal with that.

Well, this one could in principle be fixable.

In this case, the initial drive letter assignments are due to the BIOS reading the USB subclass provided by the flash drive and then mounting it over the top of the devices in the legacy BIOS APIs. For devices using floppy command sets, it assigns them a drive number from the floppy range, for devices using hard-disk command sets it assigns them a drive number from the hard-disk range.

DOS is just enumerating the disks using BIOS APIs and seeing the USB disk as whatever the BIOS reports.

The simplest workaround is simply to ask DOS to remap the drive letters, using either SUBST or ASSIGN, since that's what they are for. The really complex workaround is to put a custom boot sector on the drive to hook the BIOS APIs and lie to DOS (Ghost Solution Suite does this to some extent, in order to deal with other kinds of faulty BIOSes which do stupid things with geometries of USB devices).

Well, the boot sector is written by the HP program.  Why it would differ from one FD to another is beyond me,,,,unless it's something already on the flash drive.

I really don't have to use a one gig flash drive for a few hundred K's of data.
That's kind of a waste anyway.
I'll just use the smaller FD's and not have to worry any more about the C: prompt.

I thank everyone for their input.

Case closed.

Shadow  8-)

Edit:  I've looked at all my flash drives that boot to A: and they are all 512mb or less.  The 1 gig drives all boot to a C: prompt when made exactly the same way as the smaller drives.

So my solution is to just NOT use and Flash Drive over 512 when making a bootable FD.
I did a little shopping yesterday and found that in all the local stores, FD's below 1 gig have disappeared from the store shelves.
I really don't need any more small FD's, but if I did, I guess I'd have to do some internet shopping.  I'm sure someone out there has a quantity of the small FD's that they'd like to get rid of.
SD Flash cards of less than 512mb work just as well as the Flash Drives (also called thumb drives).
  Thanks again for all the responses.