[Coco] Bootable PCI USB Card? (On-Topic, really!)

[Roger Merchberger]

OK, this is ontopic. Really, it is!

There are a few things that I'm having "issues" with in Win2K and MESS, so 
I thought "Instead of diddling with floppies & partitions & whatnot, why 
not set up a bootable USB Key with a dos-only Win98?" so I can run dos apps 
to tranfer disks & whatnot (and the JV emulator, which I bought many years 
ago). So I did. I found enough webpages that got me working, and now my 2G 
Sandisk Cruzer Micro is FAT32 formatted, and will boot from (so far, 3 
machines tested) most any machine that can boot from a USB key.

Unforch, the 2 machines I wanted to boot this critter from most, *won't* 
boot from a USB key. :-((

My lappytop I've pretty much given up hope for - they don't publish BIOS 
upgrades for it - it's a support issue for them & you have to ship it back 
to them to update the BIOS. I'd have to boot from CD or floppy with a 
kernel that knows how to boot the rest of the way from USB, which rather 
defeats the point; but the internal floppy on the critter is actually USB, 
so that kinda limited the utility of having a Win98/DOS booter anyway, so 
not that big of a loss. Tack on no on-board serial or parallel, and that 
clinches the fact it's pretty much a Winders/Linux box. No biggie, really.

My main desktop machine[1] at home, however, was my main hope, but it 
doesn't support booting from USB either. It, however, has PCI slots (Lots 
of 'em!) and I could add (another) USB card to it if necessary, *if* that 
USB card had a BIOS that told the box how to boot from a USB key plugged 
into it.

Does anyone know if such a critter (USB PCI card with it's own bootable 
BIOS) actually exist?

Yes, a lot of wasted electrons for what some might see as a simple point, 
but better too much info than not enough... ;-)

Thanks!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

[1] Tyan 2462 Mobo w/Dual Athlon MP 2600+ CPUs, 6 or 7 PCI slots (most 
64-bit) and can take up to 3.5G RAM. Not bad for a 4-year-old system - but 
the USB spec for booting & whatnot didn't exist (or wasn't solidifed) back 
when that sucker was built. It was the very first Athlon MP motherboard 
commercially made; and at almost $500, was destined for serverdom. I had 
other plans... ;-)

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |