[syslinux] retrieve drive letter of USB Media.

Geert Stappers stappers at stappers.nl
Tue Mar 1 09:22:05 PST 2005


On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 03:51:21PM +0100, Blaauw,Bernd B. wrote:
> Does SYSLINUX have any idea which DOS driveletter would be assigned to the disk it is booting from?
> At www.veder.com someone is trying to build a USB flash drive.
> However, FreeDOS does not seem to boot correctly from it
> (bootsector trouble maybe, or kernel itself is confusing drives),
> thus we're thinking of using Syslinux + Memdisk + bootimage,
> but somehow we want to be able to also access the USB flash disk itself,
> from a batchfile.
> 
> Perhaps MEMDISK could not only have the Bootloader_ID (syslinux, and others),
> but also a disk ID (0x00, 0x80 and so on).
> 
> Then if diskID was retrieved and is 0x00,
> we know we booted from a bootdrive which would be A: and currently accessible as B: (because of Memdisk taking A: driveletter).
> 
> 
> This would at least work for diskette, but I don't have an idea if it would work for USB.
> 
> Easiest would ofcourse be to fix the FreeDOS bootsector and/or kernel, so that it appears to boot from a 256MB A: drive for example.
> 
> MSDOS (from Win98) does seem to appear OK.
> 
> Situation can be compared to booting from cdrom on a system with multiple cdromdrives, and then having to try each and every cdromdrive for finding out 'which drive contains the disk with all my info outside of the initial 1.44MB emulated floppy drive'
> 
> Any ideas?

I don't wanna make anybody unhappy,
but it seems that you have a serious legacy problem.

The trick is thinking in functionality, not in applications.
Tell your organisation about the Total Cost of Ownership of non-free
software.

> 
> Bernd

Cheers
Geert Stappers




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