Maebe

Good day to all. I have run into similar problem, and although I have partly succeeded/ partly given up, but here are my personal findings, they might complicate matters further. I tried to prepare 3 sticks, Kingston 2Gb, Transcend 1Gb and Noname 256 Mb with HP Utility, fbinst and BootIce. None of them were bootable with HP utility or similar, no matter what I chose in BIOS setup. With fbinst (formatted both with fat16 and fat32), they were bootable and recognized as fd0, with exactly the same simptoms as barnai: - find returns (ud), (fd0), (hd0,0). I can address files on (ud) and (hd0,0) without problems. (fd0) though is inaccessible: ls (fd0)/ gives "Error 17: Can not mount the selected partition", and I can't find any files on fd0, including .tag file. So nothing stored in fbinst data partition runs. When I move stuff to (ud) though, grub4dos finds it just fine. Note, however, that at some point (fd0) must have been accessible, because menu.lst is correctly loaded from (fd0). With BootIce 7.2, my computer skipped the stick if it was formatted with fat32, and recognized it as (fd0) when formatted with fat16. In fact, ls(fd0) showed correct contents of the BootIced-stick, quite unlike fbinsted-stick. I have managed to run most of recovery utilities using this setup. Now for the third part of the epic - I have tried to format 4GB stick with bootice/fat32 - and it loaded as (hd0,0) straight away. I thought that perhaps jaclaz was right, but the margin between sticks being recognized as fd0/hd0 lies at 4Gb, not 1Gb. And to make matters more complicated, after I have repartitioned my hard disk and installed Win7, my BootIce-sticks refused to boot via BIOS USB-HDD, yet continued to boot via BIOS USB-FDD To sum it up: -4GB BootIce-stick(fat32) now loads from BIOS-USB-FDD, ends up as (hd0,0), files on a stick are accessible -2Gb BootIce-stick(fat16) now loads from BIOS-USB-FDD, ends up as (fd0), files on a stick are accessible -2Gb fbinst-stick(fat16) now loads from BIOS-USB-HDD, ends up as (fd0), files on (fd0) are inaccessible, but files on (ud) are fine Now, that was complicated. Sorry for not formatting the post properly, am a bit in a hurry.