I have been trying with the help of posts read here, to boot my USN flash disk to DOS.
I have a floppyless machine .I have suceeded to enable the flashD on another machine with a built in Floppy Drive(I used the Panasonic USBASPI.sys and DI1000 drivers on a boot floppy.
But Copying these to the USB stick and booting it in the floppyless PC does not work.
This PC can boot the Stick to C: with changing BIOS booting priorty:But this fails once the USBASPI.sys and DI1000 and the config.sys files are put on it.Error meessages: cannot find Command .com,DI1000etc and DIR will not work.Removing the added USBASPI and DI1000 and Config sys removes the error messages and DIR will show files on the USB stick!
QUESTION: Can these DOS usb drivers be used only by first loading it with a floppy or RAM drive? IE: can it not run from the USB stick you want to enable in DOS?
Apologies if this is a silly question.Any advice ,gratefully received.

Make sure that you have dos on your USB Stick, and make sure that you have the correct command.com file as well. Then add the following line to your config.sys file and place it be fore your memory stick files.

shell=<drive>\commmand.com /p

<drive> is the drive designation for your USB Stick.

This should help.

This is not a DOS question, you state that the USB drive is bootable device in BIOS.

Therefore how can you boot something which is already recognised in BIOS, not feasible.

You need to SYS the drive see:

https://www.codidirect.com/shop/thefactsbehindbootability.htm

And please post in the forum correct for your operating system as this has nought to do with MSDOS and compatibles, THANKYOU

Does this:

"This PC can boot the Stick to C: with changing BIOS booting priorty:But this fails once the USBASPI.sys and DI1000 and the config.sys files are put on it"

mean that it boots without the drivers?

If so, REM out the drivers.

HTH

M2

Thanks for the replies: I will try your suggestions

I am trying to use DOS on the USB stick.
Need it to run Partition magic/Ranish PM and XOSL before OS install and for repair.
The BIOS boots it to a C: BUT(pls correct if wrong)my understanding is I need the USB DOS drivers installed correctly for DOS to work on the stick at USB2.

Firstly lets forget about USB and lets take the example you have a PC with a hard and CD and floppy drives. You install DOS from floppy to hard drive, you would then need to install drivers for your CD.

Using this example I install Panasonic DOS drivers to recognise my USB Card Reader beacuse DOS does not know what it is without drivers.

In your case the BIOS gives an INT call to the USB Device and therefore theoretically DOS installed from floppy should recognise the USB Device as a bootable drive providing the drive has an ACTIVE PRIMARY PARTITION.

My understanding is BIOS only supports USB 1.x transfer rates.

Therefore you need DOS and a floppy drive to fdisk/partition the USB Disk.

Hi
Yes I was able to use the USB stick in DOS on my old PC that has a floppy drive.
I installed the Panasonic and DI1000 drivers to a Win98 boot floppy and was able to get the Stick recognised and acessible in DOS after the drivers were loaded from the floppy.

But my other PC has no floppy.But the BIOS will let me boot the USB stick(Fromatted and activated)but I have not been able to install the Panasonic+DI1000 drivers from the stick.When i put them on the stick Error messages occur after booting:Unable to find DI100,Command com etc etc(they are on the USB stick!If I remove the USB DOS drivers and the Confi.sys files, the error messages disappear but then I have no USB DOS drivers to use!
I will also try Jasons method from a previous post(IE: boot to USB stick-make ramdrive-transfer command.com and USB DOS drivers to ramdrive-then hopefully it will pick up the USB stick)
Perhaps the DOS Drivers need first to be loaded from a floppy or Ram drive and from there to search for and activate USB Flash disks?I was hoping to do that from the USB Stick itself.
Any ideas?

Why not create a bootable CD and load the drivers from there?

PHEW!!!

YOU DO NOT NEED THE DOS USB DRIVERS, PERIOD

YOU NEED TO ENSURE THE USB DEVICE IS FORMATTED AND HAS AN ACTIVE PARTITION.

WHEN YOU HAVE ACHIEVED THIS YOU NEED TO INSTALL THE 3 BOOT UP FILES ON THE USB DEVICE (2 HIDDEN) BY SYSING THE DRIVE FROM DOS, YOU CAN NOT JUST COPY THEM OVER. IF THE BIOS STATES THE DRIVE IS BOOTABLE THEN IF THE DRIVE IS ACTIVE AND SYSED IT WILL BOOT TO DOS COMMAND PROMPT. PERIOD.

IS THIS DIFFICULT TO COMPREHEND IT IS IN THE LINK I GAVE YOU:

https://www.codidirect.com/shop/thefactsbehindbootability.htm

GOODNIGHT AND GOOD LUCK.........

Further to my last comments, if you boot your W98 PC from a W98 Startup floppy with added USB support, then provided you have no other drives connected it will assign the drive letter C: to the Flash Drive:

In this instance you can make the flash drive bootable:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;255867