Syslinux - Aug 2005 - Large disk image boot. Any suggestions%3

>Hello,
>
>
>I am managing 15 separate boot disks with various network disk images.
>These disk images are used for network installs of Windows OS's.
>Basically the network boot disk contains dos, the network drive in
>question and the connection information to the shared server for doing a
>ghost install.
>
>The problem is the 1.44 disk doesn't hold enough space to accomplish the
>job.  What I really need is a 16mb or 32mb boot disk in order to do what
>I really want to accomplish.  I have tried using a USB disk formatted
>with dos and ripped the image from linux but that doesn't seem to work.
>
>Does anyone have any good directions for create a 32mb boot disk which
>boots to dos?  Anyone already have one and willing to share it?  Also,
>what would my PXE boot configuration look like?
You can create one bootable disk image and boot the other ones from it,
using memdisk.

label 1
kernel memdisk
append initrd=image1

label 2
kernel memdisk
append initrd=image2

etc...

The single image can be a bootable CD (isolinux) or USB (syslinux) image.

The CD image is created using mkisofs and the USB image is created using
mkdosfs.

I quess you can also just create one bootable USB DOS image, without
using syslinux and memdisk.

>Does anyone have any good directions for create a 32mb boot disk which
>boots to dos?  Anyone already have one and willing to share it?  Also,
>what would my PXE boot configuration look like?
This is a way to create a larger bootable DOS image.

dd if=/dev/zero of=bigdos.img bs=1M count=32
mkdosfs bigdos.img
ms-sys -f -6 bigdos.img

A 1.44MB floppy MS-DOS system usually consist of command.com, io.sys, etc.

If it's a FreeDOS system on the 1.44MB floppy image, it wouldn't work,
because ms-sys boots io.sys (not kernel.sys).

So, use a DOS or Windows9x startup floppy image, usually created
this way `sys floppy_drive:' under DOS or Windows9x.

There are premade DOS/Windows startup floppy disk images on the web
(www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm).

Mount such a 1.44MB DOS/Windows image.
mount smalldos.img /mnt/1 -o loop

Mount bigdos.img.
mount bigdos.img /mnt/2 -o loop

Copy the small DOS system to the big DOS image.
cp -a /mnt/1/* /mnt/2

umount /mnt/1 /mnt/2

You can write the bootable 30MB DOS image to a USB flash drive.
cat bigdos.img >/dev/sda

You could also use isolinux/syslinux/pxelinux and memdisk to boot bigdos.img.

label bigdos
kernel memdisk
append initrd=bigdos.img

Makes sense and that's exactly what I want to do.  I need to download
ms-sys from SF but I'll give it a try tomorrow.  

Thanks,  

Gary 

> dd if=/dev/zero of=bigdos.img bs=1M count=32
> mkdosfs bigdos.img
> ms-sys -f -6 bigdos.img
> 
> mount smalldos.img /mnt/1 -o loop
> mount bigdos.img /mnt/2 -o loop
> cp -a /mnt/1/* /mnt/2
> umount /mnt/1 /mnt/2
> 
> label bigdos
> kernel memdisk
> append initrd=bigdos.img
>

I tried the commands that you have presented and I running into
problems.  I tried the ideology that you presented with both 32 and 16mb
configurations with no luck.  Is there something that I'm missing?

The win98se boot disk boots (just downloaded it from bootdisk today) so
I used that as a based for the boot file.

Item 8c works fine (1.44 image) but 8b fails.

dd if=/dev/zero of=boot32mb.bin bs=1M count=16
/sbin/mkdosfs boot32mb.bin
ms-sys -f -6 boot32mb.bin
mount -o loop boot32mb.bin boot32mb
cp win98se/msdos.sys boot32mb/
cp win98se/io.sys boot32mb/
cp win98se/command.sys boot32mb/
cp win98se/command.com boot32mb/
umount boot32mb

With the entry in default of:

label 8b 
   kernel memdisk
   append initrd=bigboot/boot32mb.bin
label 8c
   kernel memdisk
   append initrd=bigboot/win98se.bin

drwxr-xr-x   2 root root     4096 Aug 20 13:48 boot32mb
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 16777216 Aug 20 14:38 boot32mb.bin
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root     7168 Dec 31  1969 win98se
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1474560 Aug 20 13:29 win98se.bin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com]
On
> Behalf Of Gary W. Smith
> Sent: Saturday, August 20, 2005 12:36 PM
> To: robotti at godmail.com; syslinux at zytor.com
> Subject: RE: [syslinux] Large disk image boot. Any suggestions%3
> 
> Makes sense and that's exactly what I want to do.  I need to download
> ms-sys from SF but I'll give it a try tomorrow.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gary