Booting a 600X from USB floppy drive

[RobRyb]

Hi,

I have a 600X 2645-5EU (running Win98) that I want to use for an operating systems class. I need to be able to boot from floppy and I don't have the original swappable drive that came with the system. I do have the CD drive, but booting from CD will not help with the class.

I have an external floppy drive from another machine that I'd like to use through the USB port. I've tried configuring BIOS; there's no option for booting from USB. The user's guide doesn't mention it at all.

Has anyone had any success in doing so with this machine? How did you do it?

So far I've only had to buy a new battery. If it comes down to it, I'll buy a new swappable floppy drive. They are advertised heavily on eBay. If anyone can recommend a hardware dealer, that will also be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

[em500]

Machines from the 600 era don't support USB boot in any form. Why does it specifically need floppy boot? For most purposes the floppy emulation mode from a cdrom boot should work fine.

[RobRyb]

Machines from the 600 era don't support USB boot in any form. Why does it specifically need floppy boot? For most purposes the floppy emulation mode from a cdrom boot should work fine.

My projects will boot the machine from the floppy drive. I'd have to burn a lot of CDs to keep up! Even though I can rewrite the CD, think of the extra time I'll have to spend burning CD when compared to writing from my dev machine to floppy, then move the floppy over to the test machine (the 600).

In my case the alternaive scenario would be to use a different machine for dev (since my desktop doesn't have a CD burner), code then burn the CD, then boot the 600 from that CD. 15 or 20 times per session! I'd go nuts.

Rob

[em500]

Ok, I see. Have you considered using a virtual machine like VMWare, qemu, VPC? If you're building and modifying a small OS, it's much handier to boot from floppy image files, which is faster than writing out a physical floppy every time. And the 600X has a pretty slow POST in every reboot.

For a class I don't think the performance overhead of a VM will matter, or that you're really required to write to the metal. If you want to keep the Win98 installation you can probably even use a Linux live CD with qemu preinstalled, like Slax Killbill edition. There's also a VMWare Player add-on, but I think it's a bit outdated.

[JaneL]

Machines from the 600 era don't support USB boot in any form.

Really? (eyeing my hanger-queen USB-floppy-booting 600x with suspicion...)

[RobRyb]

Ok, I see. Have you considered using a virtual machine like VMWare, qemu, VPC? If you're building and modifying a small OS...

The irony of it all. We're doing almost the opposite of what you'd expect. We're running a research project that the prof is working on. It's not another operating system but rather a framework for running a computer without an operating system. Here's a link:

http://dosc.towson.edu/

I can't really explain it yet but the idea goes something like this: you boot to a low level app that allows you to load and run other apps. "Ah!" you may be thinking, "Isn't that just a surrogate OS?"

No, in fact, it isn't. The boot program offers nothing to the program that it loads and runs, that program being my project. When my project is running it is effectively the operating system; there's nothing else operable in memory. If I make a mistake in my program and fail to return control to the first app, the machine will simply hang (I know, we used to call that Windows 95 ).

As for running within a VM, I doubt that this project would work under those conditions. Thanks for the idea, though. If I already had a license for VMWare I'd certainly give it a try.

Rob

[JHEM]

Do you have simple BOOT enabled in the BIOS?

Turn it off.

To modify the Simple Boot Flag:
1. Hold down the F1 key on the ThinkPad and power on the system.
2. Open the Config icon.
3. Open the Quick Boot icon.
4. Set Simple Boot Flag to Disable.

James

[em500]

As for running within a VM, I doubt that this project would work under those conditions. Thanks for the idea, though. If I already had a license for VMWare I'd certainly give it a try.

Rob

I would be surprised if it didn't, since most VMs just emulate generic x86 hardware and does not care if you run an OS or not. After the bootstrap with a vanilla AMI/Phoenix BIOS, you're entirely free to run any x86 code you like, be it complete OSes, raw OS-free machine code like bootloaders, memtest86 or your own assembler hello-world programs. Unless you make use of exotic x86 instructions not supported by the VM it should work.

VMWare player is a free download, btw. It's a limited version of the full VMWare Workstation, but the limitations are easy to work around. You can't make new machine definitions, but since those are just a bunch of text files you can create them in a 30-day trail version of Workstation and copy them over the the Player, and modify them in a text editor.

Qemu is entirely free, somewhat less mature than VMWare, but in my experience easier to setup. Just boot the Slax Killbill cd, start X and execute qemu -fda floppy-image. You might be surprised how well it works.

[RobRyb]

Do you have simple BOOT enabled in the BIOS?

Turn it off.

To modify the Simple Boot Flag:
1. Hold down the F1 key on the ThinkPad and power on the system.
2. Open the Config icon.
3. Open the Quick Boot icon.
4. Set Simple Boot Flag to Disable.

James

James,

Our machines part ways on step 4. I don't have a Simple Boot Flag. It simply says "Enable" and "Disable," so I disabled it; no difference. During startup the floppy drive isn't hit until after Win98 is loaded. In Explorer it's the E: drive, not the A: drive.

Perhaps you have a different BIOS? Mine is ITET54WW, 11/30/99.

Thanks for taking the time to post,
Rob

[RobRyb]

As for running within a VM, I doubt that this project would work under those conditions. Thanks for the idea, though. If I already had a license for VMWare I'd certainly give it a try.

Rob

I would be surprised if it didn't, since most VMs just emulate generic x86 hardware and does not care if you run an OS or not. After the bootstrap with a vanilla AMI/Phoenix BIOS, you're entirely free to run any x86 code you like, be it complete OSes, raw OS-free machine code like bootloaders, memtest86 or your own assembler hello-world programs. Unless you make use of exotic x86 instructions not supported by the VM it should work.

VMWare player is a free download, btw. It's a limited version of the full VMWare Workstation, but the limitations are easy to work around. You can't make new machine definitions, but since those are just a bunch of text files you can create them in a 30-day trail version of Workstation and copy them over the the Player, and modify them in a text editor.

Qemu is entirely free, somewhat less mature than VMWare, but in my experience easier to setup. Just boot the Slax Killbill cd, start X and execute qemu -fda floppy-image. You might be surprised how well it works.

I'll give it a shot over the weekend (maybe tonight). It might be more efficient than waiting for a hardware reboot.

Thanks,
Rob

[RobRyb]

Qemu is entirely free, somewhat less mature than VMWare, but in my experience easier to setup. Just boot the Slax Killbill cd, start X and execute qemu -fda floppy-image. You might be surprised how well it works.

I downloaded Qemu and it runs the linux test well enough. How do I turn my disk image into something that qemu can use?

Rob

[em500]

If you have a physical floppy disk connected through USB, you can turn it into a floppy image file with a command like

dd if=/dev/sda of=floppy.img

The dd command in Unix copies raw sectors from one device to another. The if parameter specifies the input device (usb-storage is usually threated as the a SCSI disk, which is usually found on /dev/sda or /dev/sdb). of specifies the output device name, in the example it writes to the file "floppy.img", which you can use to boot qemu.

What tools are you using to build the floppy? Under Unix you can just use loopback mounts to emulate floppies with files. I'm pretty sure those ca be found for Windows as well. Are you writing your apps with an assembler or C compiler?