A further update for those following at home...

Having installed OpenE onto a spare 20Gb PATA disk I am now seeing the expected behaviour and no more Unknown Operand errors.

This has, at least, indicated that the problem lies somewhere between my CPU and USB pendrive. Whether it is the pendrive, the partition size, the USB bus on my motherboard... I am unable to say.


Does anyone have any recommendation on the sector size I should format to when I format the pen drive? I have tried the darned thing in USB1.1 and USB2.0 mode, FAT32 and FAT16, still bouncing into errors.

I have ordered a 2Gb drive just to test that theory also (Only £5, so worth a shot), if that one gives me the Unknown Operand trauma, then I'll have resign myself to adding another HDD to the system to run OpenE, or perhaps look to an IDE DOM.