Syslinux - Sep 2004 - Memdisk & XP MS-Dos Startup Disk with Oformat

Hey guys,

I have been struggling for a few days trying to get an image of an XP
MS-DOS Startup disk to work with memdisk/isolinux. The reason I need the
XP MS-DOS disk is I need to run oformat and cvtara which on every other
NTFS boot disk says wrong MS-DOS version. I have read through the archives
and found others with the same issue but in every post the solution was to
try freedos or another boot disk all of which solved their issue but none
of them was trying to run oformat.

I am using version 2.11 of memdisk and am able to make boot images of
almost any floppy but the XP MS-DOS. It tries to boot and memdisk does its
load fine and extracts the xp floppy image, then it says

Loading boot sector... booting...
Starting...

and just hangs there.

Basically I am trying to make a workable image that will work with memdisk
of the floppy described in steps 1-9 at the bottom of this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/winpreinst/ntfs-preinstall.mspx

It is basically a windows XP boot disk with fdisk from ME and oformat and
cvtara.

I have tried winimage 6.1 and 6.45 beta as well as rawread and floppy
image. I tested the actual floppy before imaging and it works great, but
once I make an IMA image of it and use memdisk to extract and boot the
image it hangs.

I was hoping you might have some insight? Or maybe another suggestion to
accomplish making a disk similar that will run oformat.

Dennis Levens

You are out of luck if MS did hardcode OFORMAT/CVTAREA to only accept Windows
Millennium Edition.

An alternative I can think of is downloading FreeDOS and use VERSION=8.00 in
config.sys

also ask MS why WinME kernel does not boot from MEMDISK.
I doubt MEMDISK would be the problem.

if you use the FreeDOS FREECOM program, you can change versions for programs:
CALLVER 8.00 oformat.exe oformat-options

http://freedos.sourceforge.net/freecom/packages/TESTING/com082pl3ak/xmsswap.zip
http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/stuff/soft/specials/callver.zip

CALLVER starts FreeCOM with the wanted version info.

So a WinME bootdisk, and replace command.com by the freedos version.
Add callver program

Make sure your config.sys will have the following line:
SHELL=A:\COMMAND.COM A:\ /P 

hope this will help you,

Bernd


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"Dennis Levens" <tch-sp at charter.net> writes:
> I have read through the archives and found others with the same
> issue but in every post the solution was to try freedos or another
> boot disk all of which solved their issue but none of them was
> trying to run oformat.
Current versions of FreeDOS format.exe implement a switch (/a) which
does the same thing oformat does.  See
<http://unattended.sourceforge.net/faq.html#ntfs>.

Actually, you might find the entire project
(http://unattended.sourceforge.net/) interesting.

 - Pat