China DOS Union

I want to know how to make an HDD boot disk. Now I happen to have an extra hard disk, so I have a chance to do some practical testing. Can anyone help?

Some USB flash drives come with a boot disk creation tool on the driver disc (mine did), but what it makes is a 98 boot disk. However, you can delete everything on it and then copy over the files from a Super DOS boot disk (mine boots as USB L120; I think that may be due to differences in motherboards).

Actually, we can look at it from another angle. After using Win98 to make a bootable USB flash drive, put the full WINCE set on the USB flash drive. After booting, entering the WINCE graphical interface would also be pretty good.

I already tried it. My USB flash drive is an Aigo Mini King 128M, and the motherboard is Hongqi (845G). The board has 2 built-in USB ports, plus 4 more USB extension ports (2 brackets), Celeron 1.7G, Maxtor DiamondMax 80G, dual optical drives (SONY 8/4/32 CDRW, secondary master, set to NONE in BIOS; TEAC 16X DVD, secondary slave, set to AUTO in BIOS). Under WIN98 I formatted the USB flash drive as a bootable disk, created a WINCE directory, and copied the following four files into that directory: ㈠EMBOBOOT.BMP 308278 bytes; ㈡EMBOBOOT.CNF 848 bytes; ㈢LOADCEPC.EXE 122852 bytes; ㈣NK.BIN 29586435 bytes. For convenience, I plugged the USB flash drive into the front panel (that is, the extended USB port), and set BIOS to boot from USB-ZIP. At the WIN98 DOS prompt, entering the WINCE directory and running LOADCEPC will start WINCE. But my USB boot is really slow; it took about five minutes or so to enter WINCE. This is the full edition of WINCE, with IE and WORD built in. It can recognize most network cards and automatically set up the network connection. Possibly because the secondary master (CDRW) was set to NONE, only one CDROM was shown in resources. As for shortcomings: first, it can only run its built-in programs and cannot run programs on the hard disk; second, it can only recognize FAT and FAT32 partitions, and cannot recognize NTFS partitions. (If everyone is interested in this WINCE, I might upload it. It's just that I don't know where I could upload something this big, around 30M?)

May I also ask the moderator whether it's possible to install WINXP PE onto a USB flash drive?

I want to correct everyone's concept a bit, because it feels awkward to me. The so-called U disk refers to all devices using the USB interface, including USB hard disks, USB optical discs, USB floppy disks, etc. But what everyone is talking about now is USB flash disks, which is different. Because flash disks all use the USB interface, they can simply be called flash disks; if you abbreviate them as U disks, then things get mixed up! If it's a 256MB flash disk, it's still possible to highly compress WINXP PE into it! 128 is probably not possible! ...

The poster above is being a bit too nitpicky. Among USB storage devices, flash disks are the most common. After booting, the flash disk's drive letter is A. Since even an A drive can be done, I think (I really don't have the conditions to test the USB floppy drive, USB hard disk, or USB optical drive mentioned by the poster above. And let me also correct that "awkwardness" from above while I'm at it. A floppy drive is a floppy drive; you can't call it a floppy disk.) other USB storage devices should all be possible too.

Old machines don't get to enjoy this!

Mine succeeded haha happy

So many people use USB-interface hard disks, and you didn't see that?! Just because you don't use them doesn't mean others don't!
Go look up the definitions of U disk and flash disk first, then come back and discuss the issue...

The following is quoted from GOTOmsdos at 2004-8-13 1:12:03:

I want to correct everyone's concept a bit; it feels a little awkward to me. The so-called U disk refers to all devices using a USB interface, including USB hard disks, USB CDs, USB floppies, etc... But what everyone is talking about now is USB flash drives. Those are not the same thing. Because flash drives all use a USB interface, they can simply be called flash drives; if you abbreviate them as U disks, that just causes confusion!
If it's a 256MB flash drive, it's still possible to highly compress WINXP PE into it!
With 128MB it's not very likely!...

First get clear on the difference between a CD and a CD-ROM drive, and between a floppy disk and a floppy drive, then come discuss it, okay?

The following is quoted from start3 at 2004-8-13 16:06:54:
我的成功了哈 开心

Could you please give a detailed introduction to the method, steps, and tools used? Thanks!

Let's bump this up. Boss, could you give us a tutorial?

Actually, what everyone calls a U disk generally refers to a USB-interface memory disk, also often called a "flash disk." Another commonly used one is USB-HDD, which is really just an ordinary hard disk with a usb interface and power supply added. Making a usb-hdd boot disk is the same as an ordinary hard disk, so there's no need to discuss it. But "flash disks" are different: different manufacturers require different programs to create the "boot area".

So is there any universal image that can be used or not?