Non-destructive way to test USB stick compatibility?

mr-b said:
What century are we in again?
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The century where a boot loader occupying a relatively small number of bytes has to locate a file in a file system, using file systems and device drivers that were commonly available for UPDs in 2010.

I doubt GPT would be supported!
 
mr-b said:
Curiouser and curiouser ...
Toggling the switch vs pressing the power button when on red disc, has definitely changed something. I took my gnarliest 1GB stick formatted with FAT32 and after using the rear switch, it now boots saying "System Start" but the bright blue circle goes to mid blue. The TV goes to no signal detected (I've pulled the AV amp out of the equation too just in case) and I can hear disk activity. Front panel is blank. Then after 30sec it shuts down with the red disc. Press the power button and it boots normally with bright blue disc.
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That is perfectly normal. When the power is reapplied it remembers its last state (active or standby) and will boot to that state.
E2A I'm using MiniTool Partition Wizard to format the drives as Windows sometiems wont; let you choose FAT32. And yes I was letting the disk spin down and system power off.
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OK. Is it using an MBR or a GPT style partioning scheme? It needs to be MBR to work.
 
Well that was it! I used Rufus to create a FreeDOS FAT32 partition (MBR only) on a 1GB stick, then used Explorer to delete the DOS files, copied over the loader file, renamed it and it worked first time using the front panel button (& USB port) to boot. The TV showed it had updated.
Thanks for the tip!
Obvs MiniTool PW (which normally is very good) still didn't do something correctly even with an MBR partition (or else something became corrupted subsequently).
 
That might explain why people seem to have so much trouble - the tools have moved on without considering backward compatibility (M$!).

What are your observations of loader loading?
 
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