Starting OS w/o floppy

[ehenkes]

What's the best way to start such an OS, if you have not got a floppy disk at your computer. How can you boot from and load from/save to USB memory stick in an easy way. Can you show me a link to an USB driver?

[Andyhhp]

you can work without a real floppy drive by using a Virtual Floppy Driver.

This is a small bit of software that can mount small isos as if they were real floppy drives. Then emulators such as Bochs can work with this as if it were a floppy drive.

Alternativly, if you want to use physical hardware, your bios must support USB booting in which case, the dl register at the very beginning of execution of the bootsector contains the drive number used to boot. All you need to do is save this and use it in the int 0x13 call rather than using a default drive of 0.

~Andrew

[AUsername]

If you mean you have an OS that's meant to boot off of a floppy but the computer you want to test on doesn't have a floppy. (A real hardware test)

You can use MagicISO to create a bootable CD.

ISOs can emulate floppies until you leave RMode.
BIOSs can emulate CD drives as an HDD or CD for compatibility.

[djsilence]

the best ways are: eigther use hard disk (but hard to implement at the begginers stage) or use virtual machine that support virtual floppies - the easiest way: need no reset and work quickly.

Daniel.

[joniwalker]

You can do a network boot, see http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX/

[knowledgegranted]

Depending on your motherboard manufacturer, many motherboards now support booting off of a USB drive. Check around on the internet and see if your motherboard supports it.