[syslinux] Growing out of floppy images, what's the best alternative?

Leenders, Peter Peter.Leenders at computacenter.com
Mon Apr 19 08:26:37 PDT 2010


Hello Daniel,

we use "floppy"-Images with up to 23 MB. We use these bootimages e.g. for bios/firmware update that will take up to 16 floppy disks.

With Winimage you can create Standard Images till 2.88 MB under Windows. Winimage can also handle bigger images. But I know no method to create bootable Floppy images > 2.88 Mb with onboard features of WinImage. Unfortuanally I can not give you access to our internal bootimages for licence reasons. There are instruction in the internet how to create a big floppy image e.g. out of the ghost83.bif file. If you use image bigger than 2.88 MB you have tell memdisk that this will be a floppy image and at least a hint of the geometry. In my case the extra parameters "floppy c=255 h=8 s=36" or "floppy c=255 h=16 s=36" will work with my bootimages.   

Yours sincerely

Peter Leenders


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] Im Auftrag von Lindgren Daniel
Gesendet: Montag, 19. April 2010 11:28
An: syslinux at zytor.com
Betreff: [syslinux] Growing out of floppy images, what's the best alternative?

Hi.

We've been using PXELINUX for years, to kick off OS installations
(floppy images) and booting assorted tools. The addition of ISO support
in memdisk opened up some new alternatives that we also use, e.g.
booting WinPE ISO images over PXE.

Today I downloaded a BIOS for a HP EliteBook 8440p and discovered that
the BIOS file is 3 MB. I could probably squeeze it onto a 2.88 MB floppy
image by compressing it and uncompressing it to a RAM-drive during
execution, but I started looking at alternative solutions that would be
more future proof. There are ways to make floppy images larger than 2.88
MB, but a solution that moves the limit to several hundred MB's would be
preferred.

I'm thinking of making a bootable DOS (Windows 98 version) FAT16 or
FAT32 ISO image with hard disk emulation, booted using memdisk with ISO
support. By making it an ISO image we would also have the option of
burning it to a physical CD/DVD and/or use the ISO to boot virtual
machines without network support. Using hard disk emulation removes the
need for DOS CD drivers, which (I hope/guess) makes it less prone to
BIOS-related problems.

There are several variations possible:

- Skipping ISO and booting HDD images directly over PXE. Removes the
possibility of making real CD/DVD discs and virtual machine booting.
- ISOLINUX ISO with bootable floppy image(s) that can access the ISO for
storage of larger files. Adds at least one level of maintenance.
- ISOLINUX ISO with HDD image(s). Adds at least one level of
maintenance.

Anyone else using a similar method to boot machines to DOS for
maintenance and troubleshooting? Some other method?

Cheers,
Daniel
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