[ltp] Bootable usb for bios upgrades

[Noah Dain]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 4:44 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org> wrote:
> On mar, 2009-04-14 at 10:20 +0200, Ismael Olea wrote:
>> Maybe you could upload somewhere your present working disk image for
>> only downloading and copying the needed upgrade :-)
>
> That should be doable, but two things need to happen first:
>
> - the drive size is 1G: makebootfat creates the whole partition. This is
> nice because one can just add the new files to the drive, but is not
> really suited to share it on the web.
> - I need to clarify the licences of the files I would be sharing. Not
> really sure I can redistribute the files from Lenovo, and I guess the
> kernel.sys and .bin files from FreeDOS and makebootfat are on a GPL-like
> license, which means I need to provide the sources if I provide the
> binaries.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Yves-Alexis
>
> --
> The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
> http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-thinkpad
>

I too have been trying to get a good flash usb boot system going too,
which would include a dos partition (and hopefully some linux
rescue-cd type distro on a live filesystem).

There is a utility called ms-sys on sf.net which claims:

'''This is a Linux program for writing Microsoft compatible boot
records. The program does the same as Microsoft "fdisk /mbr" to a hard
disk or "sys d:" to a floppy or FAT partition except that it does not
copy any system files, only the boot record is written. '''
- http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/

Can't say I've had any luck with it yet with either msdos7.1, 6.20, or
freedos on a 1G sandisk cruzr.  Documentation mentions some weird
possible issue with 2.6 kernels not reporting geometry correctly.

Burning a dos floppy image to a cdrom for booting in floppy emulation
mode works well, however.  The usb stick shows up as 'C:' (at least it
does on my old R40; bios behavior may vary).



-- 
Noah Dain