[syslinux] memdisk hard disk image

[H. Peter Anvin]

Egan Ford wrote:
> Can anyone please tell me how to create a bootable 10MB hard disk image
> for use with memdisk?  I'd like to use FreeDOS.  And I know little of
> DOS.

Tricky.  Almost everything can be done under Linux -- especially since I
released the mkdiskimage script, *except* making it bootable, which has
to be done with a DOS command called SYS.  The easiest way *I* have
found to do that is to use DOSEMU to mount the disk image as a hard
disk, and then run SYS on it.

It wouldn't be *too* hard to make mkdiskimage do the equivalent of
"SYS", *except* that the boot sector is DOS-version *and*
media-dependent (i.e. it's different on floppies versus hard drives) and
 isn't readily available as a file; it's only available by copying the
boot sector from another disk or disk image of the same type.

Now, that's obviously not going to change for QDOS (Quick and Dirty
Operating System, the original name for MS-DOS), but perhaps the FreeDOS
people could make the boot sector and boot files available in a more
convenient format...

	-hpa