Syslinux - Jan 2003 - MEMDISK and partition images

I just discovered the wonderful world of ISOLINUX/MEMDISK while 
investigating how to make a boot CD that doesnt have floppy disk
size limitations on its boot images.

One thing has struck me as very odd about MEMDISK though - its
support for hard disk images is restricted to physical disk images
(ie. containing MBR/partition table).

It doesnt support individual partition images, despite the fact
that these seem the most natural to use in this context:

- MEMDISK itself provides one RAM "partition", so only uses partition
1
  of a physical disk image anyway

- single partition images are uniformly supported by, and are interchangeable
  between, other popular disk image tools such as the FILEDISK driver, 
  WinImage, and the MTOOLS. This is not the case with physical disk 
  images. When using Windows, the FILEDISK support is particularly useful - it
  can make the disk image and mount it as a drive letter for easy manipulation.

So I thought I'd ask if anyone would consider enhancing MEMDISK to be able
to
support partition images too (unfortunately I can't, or I would)? It seems
like a useful feature for common use, and doesnt seem like a big job.

Any takers ???  :-)

In the meanwhile, anyone know of a tool to turn a partition image into a
physical
disk image (by working out a suitable MBR and sticking it on, etc) ??

If any of the ISOLINUX/MEMDISK authors are round here - well done on a nifty 
set of tools (wanna make it perfect now ??? ;-) ).

Thanks
SKP

newsgroups at asd-group.com wrote:
> I just discovered the wonderful world of ISOLINUX/MEMDISK while 
> investigating how to make a boot CD that doesnt have floppy disk
> size limitations on its boot images.
> 
> One thing has struck me as very odd about MEMDISK though - its
> support for hard disk images is restricted to physical disk images
> (ie. containing MBR/partition table).
> 
> It doesnt support individual partition images, despite the fact
> that these seem the most natural to use in this context:
> 
> - MEMDISK itself provides one RAM "partition", so only uses
partition 1
>   of a physical disk image anyway
Wrong.  You can have any number of partitions.

The biggest problem, though, is that you don't know what geometry you 
need if you don't have a partition table to look at.

	-hpa