I recently got a motherboard that alows me to boot a usb drive emulated as a floppy and i ran into a problem where i dont have much space to do much when i wrote the floppy image to the flash it made my space go down to 1.09MB with only 300Kb left to do anything......

Is it possible in any way to access the other part of the flash drive and use it for space for the OS???

Thanks in Advance

No, MenuetOS has no USB stack and can't access any USB device directly.
USB keyboards and mice work because they appear to Menuet as PS/2 devices.
Booting from USB works because the BIOS "translates" the calls to the floppy device controller.(all the USB stuff is handled by the BIOS)

When MenuetOS enters 32bit (or 64bit) mode, the 16bit BIOS dies and can no longer "translate" our calls. (Menuet needs to talk to the hardware directly when it's running)

What if you rewrote the bootsector and most of MenuetOS so that it is not emulated by the bios but acted as if a regular OS with a regular boot sector would this give back the space.

THX

Menuet HD installer will be done before 1.0. But you can already do it by yourself with the bootsector I pointed for you. Although this requires a bit of tweaking.

Hi Sam,

you can try the test boot sector here... http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?p=51973#51973 ... if it works for you it should allow you to retain all that lost space. the only downside to it is once your booted into menuet you no longer have the abilty to read or write to the usb flash disk until a usb stack is written for menuet. ohh btw there is no such thing as a "regular boot sector" for usb devices.

On the other hand, with the motherboard i have that supports floppy emulation, if i am able to live with the limited space, the bios typically remaps the floppy drive to the usb device which allows me to read and write to the usb device within menuet as if it was the floppy disk becuase it seems menuet uses bios calls for floppy drive interaction (this is good for writing code from within menuet), but unfortunetly menuet seems to use i/o ports for ide interaction and therefore usb emulation as harddrive or CD-rom will not allow reads and writes from within menuet unless perhaps someone writes a temporary interrupt for reading and writing to ide devices through the bios just to make this possible.

Ohh yea one more thing, menuet is more of a hobby to most so demanding such features probably wont get you to far. What we need is people who see a problem and find a means to correct it and share it with everyone else and let others build upon the ideas and examples.

JMD