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Home / Other I-Appliances / Emachines IA Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive I can boot!

Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) shaitan Profile | Email I know a lot of people have tried booting the E-manchines EZ200 from other devices beside a USB floppy or Zip and haven't had any success. I have been able to take a Sotec 32Mb USB flash drive and boot from it. I received the Sotec for free as part of buying their laptop. It came w/o a cdrom with drivers. It works with Mac OSX & OS9 and WinXP, but without drivers won't work under Win98. Neither of these OS'es allowed me to do anything more then format it. MacOSX would allow me to partition it but offers no way to set a Fat partition as bootable. I found that this past week, that my freeBSD 5.0 system recognized the USB Flash Drive and I was able to fdisk it and mark it bootable and write a standard MBR. Unfortunately, BSD's fdisk left the partition as "hidden". I could see the flash drive via Disk Utility (MacOSX) and viaSystem (WinXP) but the partition would not mount. Luckily MacOS9 ignored the "hidden" property and I copied a Win98 reseque disk to it. This also seemed to unhide the partition and it subsequently would mount under MacOSX and WinXP. I then tested it on the EZ200 and it boots! The drive, like a USB Zip appears as drive A: I've searched the web for drivers for Win98 for this device and found several other brands that do come with utilities to format the drive as a bootable drive. One brand even offers to make the their flash drive appear as a USB floppy or as a USB Zip. The advantage of booting from USB flash drive is considerable. You can get them in capacities as high as 512MB . The file system can be prepped/updated on a more powerful system and then used on the EZ200. Some models come with a write protect switch, thus allowing the EZ200 to be a very secure system. Peter 03-29-2003 17:13:15

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) mrkemak Profile Hi, I've also had success booting off a Soyo 32MB USB "Cigar" device. It shows up as a drive under Win98 and Win2000. Under 98 it can be formatted and "sys"ed to make it bootable. There's a linux distro at http://www.8ung.at/spblinux/ that is intended to be run from such a device. It boots on the Eznet , but I'm having trouble getting it to install the GRUB loader properly, either on the Sandisk,or the USB device. If I have any success with it, I'll post here. Have Fun, MrKemak 03-29-2003 20:39:58

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) shaitan Profile | Email You can get Mandrake 9.1 (http://www.linuxkey.biz/products.html) on a stick! Linuxkey sells USB pen drives preformatted with a bootable 22Mb version of Mandrake. The prices are comparable to same size blank USB pens (32MB - $21, 64MB - $39, ..512MB - soon). Saves some effort in installing and building a small package, but then you get to miss the fun and the blood, sweat and swearing of doing it yourself. 03-31-2003 07:59:59

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) hwhack Profile Wow, now this is great news! The biggest issue with the EZNET200 (in my mind) was lack of easy storage. If you can use - and boot from - a USB key drive then that problem is gone. Thanks to all those who have persevered with this machine! Regards. PS: I attempted to do this with several different supposedly "USB storage class" devices, and they did not work. Guess I just did not try the right ones! 03-31-2003 21:55:01

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) mp3boombox Profile | Email I'v gotten win98 lite to run off of a DOC. on the eznet. the system has a good deal of power for waht it has for a processor.any of you guys gone any further with your toys???? http://members.panax.com/bachh/ My EZnet 200 tower, hacking page. 07-13-2003 08:52:48

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) Stinkbug Profile I'm interested in putting either Jailbait or Win98 Lite on my EZ200 and I need a little help. I'd like to use a DOC, if possible. If I buy a USB flash drive and a DOC, how do I copy/install Jailbait or Win98 Lite to the DOC. Will I need to boot off the flash drive (with DOS or Linux) in order to get to an OS so I can install it on the DOC? My goal is to have a fast-booting, networked internet appliance. I'm leaning toward Win98 Lite because I've heard it can be made to boot very fast and I'm more familiar with Windows. 09-04-2003 23:17:19

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) jpe_dty Profile by far the easiest way to get a ez200 to boot is to use the zip drive method described in other threads. To get windows on there, format the zip disks to boot to dos, and copy the win98 directory contents (not the subdirectories) to (I think) two disks. Once it boots you should be able to fdisk/format the doc as drive c:. When you run setup off the zip disk you will get errors about missing files, but you should be able to swap the zip disks around to get the install to proceed. I think you have to use switches for setup to get it to not use extended memory, etc. to get it to run, and you will want as large a DOC as you can get and use the setup option for the minimum windows install (you can add components you need later.) 09-07-2003 06:58:02

RE:Booting EZ200 from USB flash drive (modified 0 times) jpe_dty Profile oh, another way that might be faster - the ez200 has the same basic hardware as a virgin webplayer. you can place a doc image for a 48mb doc on a zip disk and use the doc utilities to write it to the doc. I have webplayer tools/etc at my website: http://jpe45305.homeunix.org 09-07-2003 08:45:35

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