[syslinux] MSDOS not working: problem Solved
H. Peter Anvin
hpa at zytor.com
Wed Nov 13 23:40:13 PST 2002
G. Murali Krishnan wrote:
>
> In short: Is it possible to have such a feature in some future version?
> May be someimage like memdisk can do this?
> If not is there any other way I can achieve the same effect.
>
Probably not. It would entail writing to the hard disk (since that's
the only possible storage medium) which seems at best inappropriate for
a CD.
You could theoretically do something like that by putting the disk
access inside a COMBOOT/COM32 binary, but that would have to include the
whole filesystem.
Of course, for *special tasks*, you might have a lot easier job. For
example, in your install disk example, if you know none of your users is
going to have nonstandard partitioning (or if you're going to
repartition the disk anyway), you can usually use the sectors on the
hard disk immediately after the MBR. The first partition traditionally
starts at the beginning of the second track, even though there is no
requirement for partitions to be such aligned. This means some number
of sectors are left unused. These can be accessed with BIOS call INT
13h from a COMBOOT/COM32 binary, which can be used to control ISOLINUX.
This obviously takes some hacking, but it's doable.
-hpa
More information about the Syslinux
mailing list