[syslinux] memdisk hard disk image

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:

> 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...

Well, they are all part of the FreeDOS "kernel" distribution, for
which both the source and binaries are available from
<http://freedos.sourceforge.net/>.

The source to FreeDOS sys.com is here:

  http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/freedos/kernel/sys/sys.c?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

What else did you have in mind for a "convenient format"?  It would be
great to have an mtools-like utility for making bootable floppies and
hdimages.

 - Pat