Boot from Hi-MD?

[1kyle]

Tokend, reading your post one can draw a conclusion that you haven't succeeded in booting from Hi-MD (or even haven't tried to). If so, this is a measure of how helpful and useful 1kyle's information was. IMHO, this information was simply misleading.

Hi there

to boot from Minidisc -- make sure your computer's BIOS does allow USB device boot.

USB boot (not counting external CD drives here ) can be in one of two formats -- HDD (Hard Disk) which means your external device needs to have a partition table and a disk boot MBR (sector 0 etc) or as a FDD (super floppy) which does not have a partition table or a hard disk MBR.

To get MD to boot you have to choose which method your BIOS sees the MD --FDD or HDD.

(USB CD/DVD's present no problem. Bog standard CD's / DVD's are handled just as if they are internal drives so booting is not a problem with these).

Mine says in the boot menu (Press F11 to get boot menu when you start up your machine\- might be different on your BIOS but F11 seems quite common on desktop Bioses)

USB - RMD - FDD SONY Hi-MD WALKMAN

select and boot.

To create the OS on the MD you need any of the "Flash device" boot utilities out there --the computer treats the device as a USB key device.

Some BIOSES will see the MD as a USB HDD device -- if yours does that then it's easy just format your MD like a HD and create your bootable OS on it . Ensure you create an MBR on it. Try installing any distro of Linux on what the computer sees as a "Removeable Hard Drive".

You can tell if your BIOS sees the MD as a HD as you'll see in the menu something like USB -- HDD SONY Hi_MD Walkman

If like mine it's a "Flash drive" then you need to do it a bit differently. It's treated as a Super Floppy without partion info or a Hard Disk MBR.

(You'll see USB -RMD -FDD if the Bios treats it as a Flash drive rather than a USB disk drive).

Read the following for a decent intro on this stuff.

http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/usbkeys

The best way to start is to create a BART PE disk -- a windows recovery disk that will boot ENTIRELY from the flash drive even if your hard disk(s) are totally hosed up.

Cheers

-K

Edited January 26, 2007 by 1kyle

[vitvip]

Hi!

to boot from Minidisc -- make sure your computer's BIOS does allow USB device boot.

Let us omit the obvious part. Most of us are able to and know how to boot successfully from USB flash drives, USB HDDs, USB FDDs, etc.

To get MD to boot you have to choose which method your BIOS sees the MD --FDD or HDD.

In my case - FDD. Well, it's in the Removable drives category along with Teac USB FDD.

To create the OS on the MD you need any of the "Flash device" boot utilities out there --the computer treats the device as a USB key device.

Let us not omit the most important part. Would you tell which one works for you? Here is a list of utilities I tried, none of them seems to work, returning different errors:

2 utils from HP

BootDisk2BootStick

mkbt

MBRTool

Also, could you please give us the details? Is Sony driver installed on PC where you format Hi-MD? Do you use utility to format and copy bootsectors, or just to copy? When you create bootable Hi-MD, what do you end up with? File system, size?

Regards.

Edited January 26, 2007 by vitvip