[syslinux] [syslinux:disklib] disklib: make CHS calculation match core/fs/diskio.c

[Andrew Bobulsky]

Hello Shao, hpa,

I thought it was really ironic that you guys mentioned this.  I remember back when I was imaging XP, I was trying to work out specifically what I'd want to do to get gPXE/PXELINUX/COMBOOT to simplify our imaging process which at the time was using a very clunky XP live CD that took forever to boot up...  I ultimately ended up booting DOS from iSCSI and imaging via INT13 with Ghost 8, which worked pretty well.

Still, while I was wrapping my head around the concepts I was trying to exploit, I was browsing through all of these com32 modules in the SYSLINUX package then hopped on IRC and said, "Hey guys, is there a COM32 module for imaging disks?  Something like DD.c32?"

While several people (you guys included I think) remarked that it was an interesting idea, I never found anything...  Hence the Ghost 8 use :-D

I do think it would be really nifty to have a DVD with ISOLINUX that boots to a menu and images all via COM32...   no HAL issues or hardware compatibility issues, no need to wait for a "thick" protected mode OS to load.  Making modern operating systems easier to deploy by exploiting the ubiquity of the "modern" BIOS implementations has a high geek-sexiness factor to it ;)


Cheers,
Andrew Bobulsy



On Oct 16, 2010, at 3:00 PM, syslinux-request at zytor.com wrote:
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:09:04 -0700
> From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com>
> To: For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa <syslinux at zytor.com>
> Subject: Re: [syslinux] [syslinux:disklib] disklib: make CHS
> 	calculation	match core/fs/diskio.c
> Message-ID: <4CB8DF10.7030807 at zytor.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> On 10/14/2010 09:08 AM, Shao Miller wrote:
>> 
>> Somewhat unrelated: Some day in the far, far future, it might be nice to 
>> "re-image"[1] computers using INT 13h via one or more COMBOOT32 
>> programs.  - Shao
>> 
>> [1] Apply a disk or filesystem snapshot/saved-state.
> 
> That's not even very hard at all, at least not for the whole-disk case.
> 
> 	-hpa