I have some old laptops at work that I need to get access to a USB thumb drive and have it see it as drive C:
Bios doesn't support booting to usb directly
is this possible by maybe creating a bootable cd-rom

Boot to cd
cd boots to dos with usb support
cd makes usb device drive C.

8/15/2006 10:13:14 AM

how old are we talking about with laptops? also it should be noted that Windows-NT 4.0 operating systems and previous OS's did not support USB at all

8/15/2006 10:16:40 AM

Nope, find some other way, this aint gonna happen

8/15/2006 10:17:39 AM

negative ghostrider

8/15/2006 10:40:31 AM

do the laptops have a PCMCIA slot? You could get a PCMCIA CD-R and move data off teh laptops that way

8/15/2006 11:02:28 AM

you should post what you are trying to accomplish in detail - maybe someone can recommend a better way to accomplish your goal

8/15/2006 11:03:54 AM

This might help if you're trying to get the USB drive in dos. Maybe try method 3.

8/15/2006 11:13:17 AM

Quote :

"Windows-NT 4.0 operating systems and previous OS's did not support USB at all"

There are limited efforts out there to make it happen ... I wouldn't count on anything stable out there.

Quote :

"you should post what you are trying to accomplish in detail - maybe someone can recommend a better way to accomplish your goal"

Bingo. What exactly are you trying to do?

8/15/2006 12:10:04 PM

Some of our field techs have ~5 year old compaq armada 110's or e550's and booting to usb is not an option under bios. Some other techs have computers that will allow you to boot straight from the usb device. and those work fine.

We have some very old software that must reside on the c drive and must be installed in a certain folder in order for the software to work. We cannot use this with windows 2000 or xp because it uses the serial port on the computer to connect to devices and windows hogs up the port somehow and just totally confuses our old outdated software. As long as I can boot to a dos prompt I'm good. My HDD is NTFS btw. So I guess booting to a dos prompt and being able to access my HDD in NTFS would be the best, but I don't think that can be done either.

8/15/2006 1:23:01 PM

I don't see why the boot to CD, have CD change internal drive to ~C and then change the USB to C.

But, i'm also not a Windows expert (but Mac OS wouldn't have this problem ).

8/15/2006 1:30:17 PM

actually all you need is NTFS4DOS.

[Edited on August 15, 2006 at 1:31 PM. Reason : link]

8/15/2006 1:30:41 PM

Quote :

"We cannot use this with windows 2000 or xp because it uses the serial port on the computer to connect to devices and windows hogs up the port somehow and just totally confuses our old outdated software."

Normally I'd point to the BIOS, but I'm gonna scratch my head on this one if it's on the EXACT same computer. Check for resource conflicts.

Quote :

"So I guess booting to a dos prompt and being able to access my HDD in NTFS would be the best, but I don't think that can be done either."

See Shaggy's suggestion. I use this program all the time when I need to image a new computer (helps change the product key inside the Sysprep.inf file). However, USB support in DOS is extremely flaky.

Let me ask some dumb questions:
1) You can't install the program on the old laptops, correct?
2) Copy and paste with the program will not work, correct?
3) Taking the HDs out of the laptops is not possible, correct?

Because beyond those three, solutions will get extremely ugly quickly...

8/15/2006 4:49:28 PM

Why can't you just copy it to the internal hard drive directly?

Use a linux live CD or something.

[Edited on August 15, 2006 at 4:53 PM. Reason : ]

8/15/2006 4:53:06 PM