Occurs to me that this thread is more appropriate for the fractdev mailing
list than fractint, so I will crosspost this to fractdev, then follow up
there. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be ANY discussion of booting
fractint from USB here, but if we get into lengthy discussions of arcane
hardware issues (which I certainly enjoy), we may be getting a little off
topic for this list. We'll see how it goes. Anyone interested in sharing
technical information about running fractint on various platforms please
join me in Fractdev. When I have something to share with end users, I will
report here. Please understand I am not trying to shush anyone up, so if
you'd like to see this discussion here, by all means say so.
Paul wrote:
> I have found that it depends on the level of USB that you have installed
> on the computer, as well as the pluggin drive itself. Some thumb drives
> work on some of my older machines, and some do not.
>
The puzzle is that I have three self-built machines of different ages that
all have Gigabyte motherboards, AMD chips, and Award bioses. The oldest and
youngest boot USB and CF, but the middle machine does not. The point is
that these are not dissimilar, just different ages. Doesn't worry me that
one doesn't work, I guess I am just compulsive. I'll compare the bios
settings, and see if there's some setting causing different behavior. I
really want to try the middle machine because it is the only one with
NVIDIA (non-motherboard) graphics, which some folks have suggested might
have better VESA support.
I do have a plan B. I found a 2.5 inch 80gb SATA drive in my junk drawer
that came out of a Dell E1505 Laptop when I upgraded the drive. I'll blow
away the XP on it and format with FreeDOS. That should certainly work in a
dual boot configuration on the middle machine.
Followups to fractdev please.
Tim
