[ct-user] Be careful when making a bootable CT flash drive !!

[N7MAL]

It's to bad you couldn't post your problem before you reformatted and started over. Since, and because, you like to experiment you need to get yourself a copy of Partition Magic. If you had that it would have only taken a few minutes to undo the problem you created, and you would not have lost anything.....
I made a couple of gigs DOS drive, FAT32, using Partition Magic. When I use that drive I boot from a CD. For contests, like this coming weekend. I don't want to have any windows stuff available to distract me during SS.
Best 73

MAL       
N7MAL
BULLHEAD CITY, AZ
http://www.n7mal.com

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Henry Wingate 
To: CT-User at contesting.com 
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2007 5:34
Subject: [ct-user] Be careful when making a bootable CT flash drive !!


Since my new computer is able to boot directly from a USB flash drive, I 
decided to make DOS boot version with CT DOS
on it. That way I could have the rock solid performance of CT DOS as 
well as the flawless CW, and not have to worry about
conflicts in the windows machine.

When I finished building the flash drive, the system would not boot to 
windows and gave the dreaded message "missing operating
system". My new computer was destroyed ! Apparently  the culprit was the 
DOS fdisk command,  which  not only  wrote
the partition on the flash drive but also wrote it to the hard drive as 
well. When I tried to repair the hard drive with the
windows cd utilities, it said that the drive had a FAT16 partition. I 
had to completely re-install windows. What a PITA, I still
don't know how much I lost. I know a lot of my contest logs are gone.

So, if you are going to make one of these, I would recommend  disabling 
or removing the  drive  just to be safe.

On the good side the flash drive works fine.

Henry, K4HAL
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