Syslinux - Jan 2002 - memdisk hd images

How does one make a HD image?  Floppy images are easy enough, but to have to
create a hdimage, you need MBR and partitions, etc...  I want to create a
10MB DOS HD and boot it, how would I do this with Linux?

Thanks.

Egan Ford wrote:

 > How does one make a HD image?  Floppy images are easy enough, but to 
have to
 > create a hdimage, you need MBR and partitions, etc...  I want to create a
 > 10MB DOS HD and boot it, how would I do this with Linux?
 >


By far the easiest way is to use DOSEMU, if you have a DOSEMU setup.  I
usually set up the disk image I'm working on as the second harddrive in
DOSEMU.  Note that DOSEMU puts a 128-byte header on its hard disk
images; it needs to be stripped off (dd if=dosemuimg of=rawimage bs=128
skip=1) -- a future version of MEMDISK might be able to detect and
ignore it.

Unfortunately, there are otherwise no good tools to make a disk image 
from Linux; there is no tool to make an MBR (the one shipped with 
SYSLINUX unfortunately doesn't work) and mkdosfs doesn't work too well 
on a non-floppy image.

For that reason, you're probably better creating a "large floppy"
image
instead.

	-hpa

Egan Ford wrote:
> 
> I know so little about DOS, how would I go about doing this?
> 

The superblock information is kept in bytes 3-61 in the boot sector.
Those need to be preserved; the remaining bytes are the boot sector proper
that should be copied from whatever version of DOS you're using.

Under DOSEMU you can of course just run "SYS".

	-hpa