[Discussion] USB installation

[Phil Parker]

On 06/21/2010 at 10:14 PM, Kaya Imre <ki5 at nyu.edu> wrote:

>I just bought a 8GB HB memory stick and it works nicely on XP.
>I would like to be able to use it also on WARP(4.5) and  eCS(1.14). Not
>having done it before, I have no experience as to how to do this. I would
>appreciate some (detailed) help for this endeavor.  TIA.

First, you need the latest USB stack and FAT32 support. (I use eCS 1.25+ and
2.0RC7 with ecsmt and don't know how to do that on non-eCS 4.5.)

Assuming those are in place, Jan van Wijk provided the following recipe on the
dfsee-support list back in March 2007:

>To make a FAT32 memory stick, to use with eCS and XP,
>you need to make a SINGLE primary partition on the stick,
>and format that as FAT32.
>(and assign it a driveletter and volumename for LVM too)

>So the complete procedure for that is:
> - Boot to eCS that is USB capable
> - Insert the stick, wait if it is seen (or not :-)
> - Start DFSee, and WIPE the start of the stick:
>	Mode-FDISK ->
>	   MBR area operations ->
>	      Wipe start of disk to ZERO ->
>	         ... select the stick ...
> - Now eject the stick and REBOOT!
> 
> - Start DFSee again, and create a new primary:
>	Mode=FDISK ->
>	   Create new partition ->
>	       ... select freespace on the stick ...
>In the CREATE dialog, select the FAT32 type:
>	FAT, 32-bit type 0B: < Cyl 1024
>make sure the LVM info is created too:
>	[x] Include LVM information
>Then in the LVM dialog, specify an available driveletter
>and a suitable volume/partition name.

>   now format the new partition as FAT32:
>	Actions ->
>	   Format with FAT filesystem ->
>	      A Partition to be selected ->
>	          ... select new partition on stick
>  Then in the FORMAT dialog, select FAT32.
>  (it will default to FAT16 on a small disk)
>   You also may assign a different disk-label here ...
> - Eject the stick and REBOOT again!
> 
>Should be recognized and mounted by FAT32.IFS ...

>Regards, JvW

>Jan van Wijk, author of DFSee; http://www.dfsee.com

If you don't have DFSee, I strongly recommend getting it. The support alone is
more than worth the price, and it's really the best and safest way to handle
partitions etc. with multiple OSs.

It is possible to take some shortcuts on Jan's proceedure now. Nonetheless, I
followed it carefully the first time I did one and it works. The resulting USB
stick is also Vista- and linux-compatible.

-- 
   Best wishes,
    Phil Parker
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
URL http://www.math.wichita.edu/~pparker/   PAI http://arxiv.org/a/parker_p_1
Random quote:
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  with symposium to follow.