Re: boot freedos partition

[Michael Evans]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Bernhard Kuemel <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi help-grub!
>
> In order to upgrade my mainboard BIOS I need to execute a DOS program. I
> don't want to waste a CD on this and even though I have a floppy drive
> and floppies I want to run freedos from a hard disk partition. Be it
> because hard disks are more reliable or just because some day I might
> not have any other choice. I read about methods involving disk images,
> but I think just using a FAT partition should be the easiest and most
> natural way.
>
> So I formatted a 7 GB partition with mkfs.msdos which created a FAT32
> partition. Not sure if freedos is compatible with 7 GB FAT32 partitions.
>
> I copied these files from
> http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz to the partition:
>
> autoexec.bat
> command.com
> config.sys
> install.bat
> KERNEL.SYS
> sys.com
> wsys.exe
>
> http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/boot.htm#dos says:
>
> "FreeDOS can be booted by either chainloading the partition boot sector
> of the relevant partition, or directly chainloading the file kernel.sys -
>
> title Boot FreeDOS
> root (hd0,0)
> chainloader /kernel.sys
> "
>
> Great, I couldn't find a way to install a boot sector with linux
> anyways. I changed that to:
>
> menuentry "FreeDOS" {
> set root=(hd0,6)
> chainloader /kernel.sys
> }
>
> Is this the correct?
>
> When I boot "FreeDOS" I get the error: "invalid signature".
> Grub does display a list of files when I hit tab and completes 'k' to
> 'kernel.sys' so it seems to be able to read from the partition.
>
> Should I capitalize kernel.sys?
> Should I mark the partition bootable?
> Does it need to be a primary partition?
> Shall I use FAT16?
>
> Bernhard
>
>
>
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Why not use a floppy-disk image and syslinux's memdisk 'kernel' to
solve this problem?  I've not tried it with grub before, but it would
probably chainload from there properly too.