Re: Detecting CDROM drive from FreeDOS boot floppy

On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 18:35 -0400, Allan Adler wrote:
"MasterBlaster" <Nobody's.Home@xxxxxxxx> writes:

Back to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
Down to "Non-Windows Based Image Files W/ImageApp" and pick
Win98 or Win98SE. Unzip it somewhere, put a blank floppy in the drive,
and run FIRM WIN98C.IMG A: -w (for the 98 version).

OK, I downloaded it. I think that when you write
FIRM WIN98C.IMG A: -w
you mean that the command should be executed under (FREE)DOS or WINDOWS.
I think that means that FIRM.COM and WIN98C.IMG (which are produced by
unzipping win98c.zip) can't both reside on a floppy, since WIN98C.IMG
is already the size of a floppy. Therefore, I would have to do this on
my FREEDOS machine, which I don't think has a version of UNZIP installed.
Pending the acquisition of UNZIP from somewhere for FREEDOS, I tried to
do the work on the HP Pavilion under Linux instead. I copied win98c.zip
to the HP Pavilion and unzipped it. Then I executed
dd bs=1474560 if=WIN98C.IMG of=/dev/fd0
which caused the file WIN98C.IMG to be mapped onto the floppy disk.
Then I booted the floppy and found lots of nice things on the disk
and it also detected the CDROM drive without any modification to config.sys.

Then I changed to the cdrom drive r: and executed start. I got the same
error message about being unable to execute the file start.exe in DOS mode.
So, this windows boot floppy is apparently really a DOS boot floppy.

The picky little detail that matters may be the -w at the end of your
recommended
FIRM WIN98C.IMG A: -w
i.e. maybe the -w means that the MBR of the floppy should be written with
something that says it is really a Windows diskette. In other words,
maybe WIN98C.IMG really is just a DOS diskette image, and all the information
about how to tell it to be a Windows diskette resides inside the program
FIRM.COM.

If that information is available in another image, I can just use the Linux
dd command to write it to the MBR of the diskette, with something like
dd bs=1k if=mbr.img of=/dev/fd0
But where is that information? Perhaps in the source code for FIRM.COM,
wherever that is?

Note that the partition table (and MBR) is of a standard format for
*ALL* (well almost) operating systems. Note that the MBR contains no
information about OS's - it does contain codes indicating what kind of
file system is on each partition (e.g. FAT16, ext2, NTFS etc).

Note: Windows 98 IS DOS based; this is why the "recovery diskette" boots
into DOS. But I doubt that this helps you; you have your system booted
as DOS and can read a CD - and that's it!

I suppose you could investigate putting lilo onto a diskette and chain
loading the mbr of your bootable CD - but that would be very complicated
for you.

--
Jeremy Boden


.

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