[Trlog] bootable USB "thumb drive" for XP

[Pete Smith]

The 128 MB thumb drive I just got at Staples for $15 came already formatted 
in FAT -- I don't know if FAT 16 or FAT32, but assume the former.  I booted 
from a rescue floppy and ran TR from it without incident, except that 
operations requiring disk reads and writes took perceptibly longer than on 
my Win98 machine using the TR on its hard drive.  I think it would need 
Smartdrive to be comfortable, because, for instance, appearance of 
characters of a callsign on-screen noticeably lagged as the machine checked 
the master.dta file.  This suggests to me that something about the USB 
interface may be putting limits on the thumb drive's access speed.  It's a 
2004 Dell Dimension 2400.

73, Pete N4ZR

At 10:44 PM 11/12/2004, Dick Frey wrote:

>XP is making it tougher to get enough laptops together to run a decent Field
>Day network using TR. I have found a solution that does not involve
>partitioning:
>go to http://www.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html
>search for   softpaq sp27213.exe  and download it.
>
>This app partitions and formats a USB drive as a boot and loads DOS from
>your computer, very much like making a bootable floppy with the old SYS A:
>command. It comes with fairly straightforward directions. First, I re-booted
>the XP and went into the BIOS and changed the order in which it selects boot
>drives-  USB first, then the CD, then the HDD.
>
>The installed program is called HPUSBFW, a 450k Windoze app. Running it will
>reformat the USB "thumb drive" for FAT16, and make it bootable. I'm working
>on a brand new HP 3.6GHz XP workstation I just bought for the office. Now
>with the USB drive formatted, you go again to HPUSBFW and it will ask where
>you want to load DOS from. I said C:\boot (that's where I had found
>command.com and the hidden .sys files on my workstation).
>
>Restarting the XP machine again with the thumb drive in the USB slot
>resulted in an almost immediate boot and a C: prompt!
>
>I rebooted the machine again without the USB drive and then loaded TR into
>it at \log and put an appropriate autoexec.bat in the root so it can find
>TR. If you use Himem or Smartdrive with TR, you need to load those .sys
>files along with command.com, but with more than 127M of really fast disk
>space on the USB drive, that's unlikely.
>
>I took the thumb drive over to WA7AJ's house and stuck it into the USB port
>on his XP laptop. We hooked up a null modem cable from it to my W98 laptop
>and had an instant TR network. This was something we COULD NOT do at FD with
>his computer. I don't have an XP machine at home so I can't check out LPT
>keying or talking to my radio on COM1, but I think it's there. Worth a try.
>
>This 128MB USB drive came from Costco about a year ago for $39, prices have
>dropped since. You could use other kinds of solid memory but they have to
>appear as boot drive choices in your BIOS !!!
>
>YMMV. I am no computer guru but this was pretty simple.
>
>
>Dick Frey    k4xu
>
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