USB on Michael’s Domain

Booting my Lenovo ThinkPad X390 from USB

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s sometimes harder than you think to boot a computer from a USB stick. It takes two non-trivial skills to pull it off:

Old Macs and USB support

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We have a few legacy Macintosh computers at work which are still running different flavours of MacOS 9 . Although these machines have USB ports, they are mostly non-functional. I think MacOS 9.0 was the first version that supported USB mass storage devices, but apparently support has been shaky until and including version 9.2.2. Apparently the various updates to MacOS 9 mainly addressed the problems with USB (and firewire) support. At least for one of these machines (running MAcOS 9.2.2) I managed to fix the USB support. I removed all non-Apple USB- and firewire-related extensions from the system folder (e.g. some from Lacie). Then I downloaded the MacOS 9.1 upgrade from Apple and extracted all USB-related extensions using TomeViewer and replaced the existing (9.2.2) extensions by these (9.1) counterparts. After a reboot my (PC-formatted) USB stick was recognized immediately. Here is the list of extensions that I replaced:

Connecting the external hard drive to my computer (Maxtor One Touch 200GB, FireWire & USB 2.0/1.1)

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The hard drive was connected to Redhat9 Linux via firewire and the hard drive had a reiserfs filesystem. It was supposed to be used for backups, but suddenly stopped working (it was not anymore recognized during system startup). Probably that had something to do with the external USB zip drive. Both are apparently visible to the system as SCSI devices and the zip drive might have (via automount) occupied the sda number that was manually added to /etc/fstab to enable the Maxtor hard drive. To check whether everything is OK with the drive itself, I connected it to my work computer. My work computer, however doesn’t have a fire wire card, so I had to use the USB port. This shouldn’t make any difference as both USB and firewire are somehow treated as SCSI devices.I only edited /etc/fstab adding the following line:/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhd1 reiserfs defaults 1 2I first forgot to create the directory /mnt/usbhd1. Thus after restarting the drive was not mounted. I checked with /sbin/fdisk -l and there was the following entry/dev/sda1 Windows 95 (or something like that)Funnily the resiserfs file system shows as a fat filesystem. I changed the “reiserfs” entry in /etc/fstab to “vfat” and created the directory /mnt/usbhd1. During startup there was an error (something like “no fat filesystem could be found on the partition”). So I changed it back to reiserfs, rebooted and the external drive was mounted during startup without problems.

Rio500 drivers for W98 and W2K under VMware

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

VMware W2K and W98 do not recognize my Rio500. As I run not from a physical disk, I cannot reboot into W2K or W98 and install the driver from there. I checked, however where the drivers go during the install under W98: the driver consists of two files: riousb.inf and RioUSB.sys. The riousb.inf goes to two places: to C:\windows\INF and (under the new name of RioPort.Comriousb.inf) to C:\windows\INF\OTHER. The RioUSB.sys goes to C:\windows\system32\drivers. I couldn’t check where W2K puts the drivers, becasue when I tried to start up W2K I got the following error: Cannot find file system32\ntoskrnl.exe. Please reinstall.