[syslinux] Memdisk & XP MS-Dos Startup Disk with Oformat

[Dennis Levens]

Hey guys,

I have been struggling for a few days trying to get an image of an XP
MS-DOS Startup disk to work with memdisk/isolinux. The reason I need the
XP MS-DOS disk is I need to run oformat and cvtara which on every other
NTFS boot disk says wrong MS-DOS version. I have read through the archives
and found others with the same issue but in every post the solution was to
try freedos or another boot disk all of which solved their issue but none
of them was trying to run oformat.

I am using version 2.11 of memdisk and am able to make boot images of
almost any floppy but the XP MS-DOS. It tries to boot and memdisk does its
load fine and extracts the xp floppy image, then it says

Loading boot sector... booting...
Starting...

and just hangs there.

Basically I am trying to make a workable image that will work with memdisk
of the floppy described in steps 1-9 at the bottom of this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/winpreinst/ntfs-preinstall.mspx

It is basically a windows XP boot disk with fdisk from ME and oformat and
cvtara.

I have tried winimage 6.1 and 6.45 beta as well as rawread and floppy
image. I tested the actual floppy before imaging and it works great, but
once I make an IMA image of it and use memdisk to extract and boot the
image it hangs.

I was hoping you might have some insight? Or maybe another suggestion to
accomplish making a disk similar that will run oformat.

Dennis Levens