Bootable USB for Disk Patch

[tip32a]

I may have the reason for my apparent slowness.  When I was using the floppy dish I was greeted with options before DP actually The USB version I am using does not.

Is there a clear and concise instruction for making DP run from a bootable USB Drive?
 

[Tom]

That doesn't make much sense. The medium that is used to run DP has no influence on the performance, except when writing to the log file. But that shouldn't make a big difference, unless you hear the floppy disk grinding all the time because of bad sectors that are found on the hard disk (bad sectors are logged and info is then written to the log file).

There's no description on creating a bootable usb key but the diskpatch manual has some suggestions. Look under the USB section.

[tip32a]

When booting from floppy there is an option to use DMA on the USB drive there is not.  I understand there should be that is why I was looking for better instructions for creating the bootable USB version.

[Joep]

Hello,

9 out of 10 times the PC will detect USB storage in DOS mode and allow you to boot from it. A nice and simple utility to make your USB device bootable is the 'HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool'. Google for it, use it, copy DP.EXE on there and you're done.

Forget the UDMA driver / DMA boot option. It will only work on older machines in combination with specific shipsets + it should be avoided when cloning a bad disk because it's not desigend to handle that (which is why we do not load it by default).

DiskPatch cloning speeds should not be compared to *backup* disk cloners like Ghost, TrueImage etc., you will never get those speeds using DiskPatch. First there a difference in environment ,real-mode DOS vs. Windows / Linux. That alone accounts for huge differences in transfer speeds. Plus, those tools skip unused parts of a file system. So if only 45% of a drive actually contains data, those tools will only 'copy' 45%. DiskPatch does not skip a thing, it copies each and every sector of a hard disk. To recover data from a disk you may also need the unused parts of a disk.

You state DiskPatch is slow. Yes, it *is* slow relative to software like Ghost and TrueImage etc.. It does not matter if you run DiskPatch from CD, diskette or USB device, this 'slowness' is within DiskPatch. It is a result of the anvironment it runs in (real-mode DOS) and it is by design. If you're dealing with a really bad disk, containing lots of unreadable sectors a diskette will 'feel' slower bacause of the time needed to log read errors, this is due to slowness of the floppy diskette media.