hi, i am trying to boot a 64 meg USB thumb drive with network support. the disk has an MBR on it with a single Fat16 partition. i copied dos files onto it (io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com in that order) that came off of a win95 installation cd. the boot disk boots up just fine leaving me at a C prompt. i can do a dir listing and even run certain programs with no problem. however, when i try to execute any "net" commands like "net initialize" or "net bind" i get an error message saying "Not ready reading drive C". from what i can tell this error message must be coming from the bios as i could not find it in io.sys or command.com...nor in the mbr/pbr. this same configuration of files works fine on a boot floppy so something is amiss specific to USB drives. Anyone know what the problem may be? thanks!

ken objective: boot a 64 meg USB thumb drive with network support work done: > disk has an MBR on it with a single Fat16 partitio - OK > copied io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com in from win95 installation cd - OK > boot disk boots to C: prompt - OK > dir listing and run certain programs - OK > try to execute any "net" commands like "net initialize" or "net bind" i get an error message saying "Not ready reading drive C" What network drivers have you loaded in config.sys and autoexec.bat? AFAIK, bootable DOS, by itself (from Win9x) does not have any networking components loaded/enabled.