Booting of USB Memstick Lexar Jumpdrive

[Sabrehawk2]

Please help me. Im trying to boot my PC of Lexar Jumpdrive ELite 1.x (usb 2.0). I tried various methods including the HP USB Formatter and either 98 boot images or FreeDOS. The Computer (DFI Lanparty Nforce3) recognizes the stick as present. Windows XP Pro sp2 canaccess,format,read and write to the stick. But if i try to boot from it using 98 DOS image files the PC wil hang when trying to post.

If i use FreeDos i at least get to see the line of text at the bottom of the post screen: "FreeDos",but then the boot process will not continue. It will either stall or even freeze based on which bios settings i use concerning "boot other device" etc.

 

I tried various combos of boot settings. The Boot order is Removable,Hard Disk,Disabled for First Second and Third Boot device. I tried Base640k or Shadow

for USB Memory, i tried USB Storage/Keyboard On/Off. I tried a lot of things.

I cant get it to work. I also had isses booting of USB External DVD Burner.

I had to turn off the IDE Channel for it to work properly, that didnt help with

the USB Stick though.

 

I think it might be a BIOS problem or a bootblock problem of the stick.

Another oddity: XP Pro says its a HARDRIVE, while the BIOS treats and

shows it as REMOVABLE DRIVE.

 

Is there some help on this issue? Ive read a lot of pages concerning usb memstick boot problems and though there were a lot of information

even sometimes technically very advanced i couldnt find my problem being reflected 100% by the descriptions i went through.

[Sabrehawk2]

Miracles still happen.

 

I must say LEXARs support was really a 100% winner in this case.

They have a live support chat 24 hours a day.

 

I contacted them on thursday at about 6 AM Central Euro Time.

The person in the chat connected was in India .

He/her coulndt help me and forwarded my support request so

senior tech.

 

It took just another 4 hours and i had an email of them containing

a special formatting tool that i used on the stick.

 

After that the sticks was modified to be detected as

 

USB HDD0 in the bios. (prior it was removable device)

 

Set bios to Boot from Hard Disk. Change boot priority or use ESC

to select USB HDD0 from the menu.

 

(too actually boot with it then copy over boot files from an appropiate source to

the stick, for instance freedos or bootimage files such as the win98 or others,

just as long as they support FAT16 (FAT).) This stick only supports FAT.

It can be formatted as FAT32 in Windows BUT the tool i provide here will

only format FAT so i guess its limited to that if you want to boot with it.

 

VOILA !

 

Superb solution for bios flashing!

 

The file size zipped is about 350 kb so i had to split to attach it to the post.

 

(@Moderator : Since the cause/solution for this problem is no longer issue

of the Mainboard feel free to move this thread to a appropriate location)