from "David Quintana (gigaherz)" gigaherz@gmail.com:
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First of all, I'm not an expert when it comes to what ReactOS supports in terms of real hardware.
I believe (someone will correct me if I'm wrong), that ReactOS is not currently able to boot from USB, and in fact, will fail to boot at all if an incompatible USB controller (which is most of them, I think?) is present. Burning a CD-ROM with the setup or livecd images, and possibly disabling the USB controllers from your bios config, may give you better results.
I'm assuming that your intention is to try ReactOS in real hardware, otherwise it would be better advised to just use VMware, VirtualBox, or QEMU, as those work mostly out of the box.
Ideally, your real-hardware testing platform should have a serial port, and this serial port should be connected to another computer with a serial port, by using a null-modem cable. This way you could see debug messages through the serial port, and interact with the remote debugger driver when (more than if) it crashes.
ReactOS currently only supports FAT32, because it's a simple driver that does not need advanced features of the storage system. As the storage stack improves, it will be possible to attempt using more complex drivers. We already have an EXT2 driver, but last I heard it was not stable enough to be able to boot from it.
That's all I know. If it's not enough, maybe someone with more experience can add to it.
Thanks for response, but surely one-part plain text would be better than multipart/alternative?
I could try commands such as drivemap in GRUB 2, but then ReactOS would be lost when trying to boot.
Would MS-Windows drivers work in ReactOS when running from within VirtualBox or QEMU?
I don't really want to try ReactOS on the same disk with FreeBSD and Linux installations that I want to keep intact, might be too hazardous.
I don't have any serial ports but have serial headers on motherboard, could conceivably make a serial port.
FreeDOS can boot from USB stick thanks to recognition by the BIOS/UEFI.
I really would want to install ReactOS to something rewritable; having to burn a new CD for every little change is too much.
With ReactOS being far from ready for production use, I figure I would have to make frequent changes/adjustments.
I downloaded the installation iso for ReactOS 0.3.15, burned to CD, but that failed to boot.
I believe Linux and *BSD are far more flexible in where they can install to than MS-Windows or OS/2. I hope ReactOS could rise above such Windows booting limitations.
I ran OS/2 from 16-bit 1.3 in 1990 or 1991 to OS/2 Warp 4 in the single-digit days of April 2001. Then following a crash, on the next boot, CHKDSK, which ran automatically on the uncleanly-dismounted file system, ran amok and trashed everything on the hard drive. I was never again able to boot OS/2 after that. Now Linux and FreeBSD capabilities seem to far surpass OS/2 and its successor eComStation.
Tom