[syslinux] USB-FDD

[A.J. Venter]

On Thursday 19 January 2006 03:20, Adam Wysocki via ArcaBit wrote:
> 18.01.06 nazosan at gmail.com wrote:
> > Yikes.  Well, I suppose you might try giving it the same partitioning
> > and formatting as a floppy disk (I suppose 2.88MB would do.)
>
> The disk must have a partition table - it have to be seen by Windows as
> a normal USB drive.

While this is true, it's only a partial truth, I know for a fact that many of 
them DONT keep the partition table in the writable flash, opting instead for 
a read-only fake partition table, hardwired onto the control-board, that 
presents only one partition back to the OS. 
There are at least two major variants of USB flash drives, one lot has no 
partitions and to mount them under unix you must mount the device itself as 
you would e.g. do for a floppy or cdrom, another lot has a partition table 
and present themselves as hard-drives with one fat partition, at least some 
of the latter cannot have this partition table edited - if you try it will 
simply throw errors when you try to save the table and revert to the original 
(depending on the OS this may not happen until reboot). 

USB floppy drives use the same architecture as the first type of flash drives 
- presenting the floppy directly so it gets read as a device NOT a partition.

Then finally there are REAL USB hard drives and IDE/PCMCIA-to-USB-adaptors - 
those function like normal drives and can be partitioned and formatted any 
way you like, in other words they are an altogether different bowl of fish 
since they behave like actual drives. 

Hope this helps a little.

Ciao
A.J.
-- 
A.J. Venter
Chief Software Architext
OpenLab International
www.getopenlab.com
www.silentcoder.co.za
+27 82 726 5103