[syslinux] Usin ISO Linux & Memdisk to create a Viritual Floppy drive that Linux & Windows can load driver disk from.

[H. Peter Anvin]

Harald_Jensas at Dell.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It is becoming a bad habit for big OEM vendors to sell computers & servers without floppy drives.
> Unfortunatly both Windows and Linux (RedHat) need a floppy drive to load storage drivers etc. during installation.
> 
> This is what I was thinking:
> Use ISOLINUX and MEMDISK to load a floppy image of a driver disk into memory as a viritual floppy drive "A:"/"/dev/fda" And then "chainload" into Windows Installation and be able to F6 and load the driver of the viritual floppy drive.
> 
> Would this be possilble?
> 
> I would like to create a CD with several driver disks, and possibly eaven some diagnostic tools and recovery console etc. Anyone done something like this before? Dockumented anywhere?
> 

Someone would have to write a Windows driver for the virtual disk, and 
*I* won't do that.  It shouldn't be too hard, however, since it's just a 
chunk of memory which should be preserved from the OS.  The MEMDISK 
detection API will tell you where in memory it is located, so it can be 
treated as a MTD (memory technology disk) at that appropriate location.

As far as Linux is concerned, the easy way to do this is to use the 
existing MTD driver, and either add detection code or somehow configure 
it manually.

	-hpa