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I have a small form-factor Intel Atom-based PC to replace a PC in an industrial panel. I have it running the original application on FreeDOS, booting and running from a USB memory stick, and all is well. I now want to purchase a hard drive to replace the USB stick with a view to improved reliability. The application logs events and batch reports to hard drive at a rate of about 2MB per year - not much.

Will any USB drive work or so some require their drivers to be installed first (which wouldn't be possible if the driver is on the boot disk)?

Any other things to be aware of? And am I right not to trust the USB memory stick?

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  • That entirely depends on the partition schema of the drivers. FreeDOS has very specific limitations when it comes to that. Will ANY drive work, absolutely not, unless its a formatted as FAT32
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 11:13
  • Point taken and easily fixed on a new drive. My question is will any drive be USB bootable or could I find myself with a USB drive that can only be read when mounted by an OS booted from another device?
    – Transistor
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 12:39
  • Are you asking if FreeDOS will mount any USB device or will any USB device support being ran from any USB Device. I know in a very short amount of time Intel won't support the act of booting USB 2.0 devices.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 12:59
  • @Ramhound, I'm asking the second question. If my Intel Atom is booting a USB 2.0 memory stick then will it be able to boot from ANY USB hard drive?
    – Transistor
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 13:49
  • USB stands for universal serial bus. USB itself is a standard which means all storage devices are suppose to work identically. Your system supports booting to USB 2.0 storage devices. This means it will boot any USB 2.0 storage device.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 26, 2015 at 14:19

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