[syslinux] memdisk hd images

[H. Peter Anvin]

Egan Ford wrote:

 > How does one make a HD image?  Floppy images are easy enough, but to 
have to
 > create a hdimage, you need MBR and partitions, etc...  I want to create a
 > 10MB DOS HD and boot it, how would I do this with Linux?
 >


By far the easiest way is to use DOSEMU, if you have a DOSEMU setup.  I
usually set up the disk image I'm working on as the second harddrive in
DOSEMU.  Note that DOSEMU puts a 128-byte header on its hard disk
images; it needs to be stripped off (dd if=dosemuimg of=rawimage bs=128
skip=1) -- a future version of MEMDISK might be able to detect and
ignore it.

Unfortunately, there are otherwise no good tools to make a disk image 
from Linux; there is no tool to make an MBR (the one shipped with 
SYSLINUX unfortunately doesn't work) and mkdosfs doesn't work too well 
on a non-floppy image.

For that reason, you're probably better creating a "large floppy" image 
instead.

	-hpa