esco

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So, FDD means *Flash Disk Drive* in this thread, and not *Floppy Disk Drive*?!

There are so many abbreviations--I'm always challenged to keep track of them all!

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So, your system supports booting from a USB flash drive!  I assume it is assigned the drive letter A:\ during boot to DOS--and you're at the A:\ DOS prompt before you type *RESTORE*--is that correct?

esco

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Oh...interesting!

Your flashdrive must have its *media type bit* set to HDD instead of removable media!  Did you set that yourself, or did it come that way.

If you would, in Windows mount that flashdrive and look at it under Disk Management--is it a *Basic Disk* or called *Removable Media*?

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It might be the HP utility, but I've not heard of it doing that.

The *media type bit* is apparently on the USB flashdrive's controller--and at least on some brands of flashdrive you can find utilities that can change it--so that bit is in some cases flashable!

When you hook the flashdrive up and re-boot--do you have a *boot menu* that you can bring up--F8 on my system--what does it call your flashdrive--USB FDD (floppy disk drive), or USB HDD?  Or, enter the bios and look at the boot order settings--how is the flash drive listed there--again the flashdrive probably has to be hooked up prior to going to the BIOS!

Yes, flash drives typically show up in Windows as a removable hard disk.  At least current flash drives do.

But evidently that was not always the case.  Several years ago, I recall a discussion of how a manufacturer could design a flash drive to present itself as a floppy disk or a hard disk.  A flash drive has to have some sort of firmware built into it--of course it does, or else it would be not much more than additional ram.  I think most flash drives nowadays might be hard-wired at the factory to appear to the system as though it were a hard disk, but that may be just a manufacturer's design decision.  There were at least some HP flash drives at one time that could be reconfigured one way or the other.

I remember tinkering with an old version of the aforementioned HP utility several years ago and it had an option to configure the flash drive like a hard disk or as a giant, super-sized floppy disk.  (I don't know if any recent version of the HP utility still has that feature . . . it's so hard to tell because HP keeps changing their pages and revising their software, and yanking old versions of their software off the 'net.  That's why most of the search results you find in google searches end up as dead links.)

I was reminded of this recently when I saw the mention of Buffalo USB wireless adapters in another thread.  It reminded me that I still had a Buffalo WLI-KG54-AI tucked in the back of a drawer here.  This particular device was unusual in that it was not only a wireless-g adapter, but also had a built-in USB flash drive that presented itself to the system as a CD drive!  Plug the device into a USB port and Windows would "find new hardware" for both a nic and a CD drive--and if you hadn't disabled auto-play in Windows it would automatically install the Buffalo wireless drivers from the fake "CD".

I bought the device because at the time I thought it seemed like a cool idea, but later realized it would have been a lot more practical if the "CD" part of the flash drive had shown up like a regular flash drive (so you could update the nic drivers) instead of like a read-only CD.