Accessing USB in DOS

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wavetar
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Accessing USB in DOS

Post by wavetar »

In the "Booting with USB" sticky thread, I detailed how to boot a computer into DOS using a USB flash drive. While useful for some, it only works for the latest computers with "boot from USB" as an option in the BIOS.

What about the other 95% of computers which are new enough to have a USB port, but cannot boot from them? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take your Windows 2000/XP, NTFS formatted computer and somehow get access to all your DOS RSS on a USB stick?

There are several different ways to accomplish this...and I won't claim to understand all of them. The method that worked for me is outlined in the following article:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10215

Basically, it involves copying a couple of driver files to your floppy bootdisk, and adding a couple of lines to your "config.sys" file.

Go to this site, and download the "motto hairu" zipped file:

http://www.stefan2000.com/darkehorse/PC ... ivers/USB/

Unzip the file, you will find 5 files:

DI1000DD.SYS
RAMFD.SYS
README.ENG
README.TXT
USBASPI.SYS

The highlighted files are the driver files we will be using. Ignore the "readme.txt" file, as it comes up gibberish...the "readme.eng" file is the english help file. The "RAMFD.SYS" is a third driver to use in special cases...read the help file for more info on that.

Take the USBASPI & DI1000DD files and copy them to your floppy bootdisk. Open the "config.sys" file on the floppy and add these two lines:

device=USBASPI.SYS
device=DI1000DD.SYS

That's all it took for me...I plugged the USB stick in and booted the computer with the floppy disk. It recognized the USB stick and assigned it a drive letter. I was able to run several RSS programs from the stick, and read/save archives. In short, awesome!

(minor edit)

USB access is slow unless you enable "smartdrv.exe" for the USB drive. So, you need to copy smartdrv.exe onto your boot floppy, and add the following line to your "autoexec.bat" file on the floppy:

A:\smartdrv.exe

This speeds things up significantly.

(/minor edit)



If the USB access method above doesn't work for you, you can read a good write-up on the subject with several different methods to try here:

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

Good luck,

Todd
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HLA
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Re: Accessing USB in DOS

Post by HLA »

does this work for other usb devices or have you just tried it on thumb drives?
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miodek1987
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Re: Accessing USB in DOS

Post by miodek1987 »

For me it worked with all USB devices.
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