China DOS Union

It is okay to load ieldr on a floppy disk, but when booting the ISO of (hdd0,0), an error of automatic restarting as in the video 2 of "Post 134" will occur.
By the way, what software do you use to post pictures? Don't throw eggs at me : ) I've never posted pictures before!

I watched your video. There is one that has started the ISO file. That "LOADING STAGE2" indicates that the ISO file has been started. It might be that ISOGRUB has issues in the virtual environment. It is suggested to replace an ISO for testing. It is recommended to use MEMDISK to call this IMG.

But why can the grub on the hard disk installation's menu.lst correctly boot the iso by calling ieldr? Also, ieldr is quite picky about bootable iso files! You'll know if you test it yourself. The grub.iso I used for testing is the one included in the latest version of the ieldr compressed package. I changed to several other bootable isos and none could boot.

Well, I didn't explain this clearly, which is my fault. It can guide the ISO of the multi - boot CD generated by EZB, but it can only guide the ISO in virtual mode. The ISO of non - virtual ones such as XP or PE cannot be guided.

Oh! Got it, so it means I've been busy for nothing. Now that ieldr is too immature, my interest in it is immediately gone. Looking forward to Brother Budian releasing a new version of grub for dos as soon as possible.

Hehe, you are too ungrateful, may I ask if you can find a better way to boot ISO, or when you come up with a function in GRUB that has RUN XXXX.ISO, I will be the first to congratulate you.

Also, the image tool I used is uploaded here for you to download. Open the attachment

Any technology has its limitations. Some we can get rid of, some unfortunately we can't, and then we just have to endure. I don't have the energy to do ISO emulation, and even if I did, I'd run into the same problems Gandalf ran into. We've discussed this technology a long time ago. I see this problem is complicated, so I've decided not to get involved. More radically, as for myself, I look forward to phasing out CDROM as soon as possible to save our followers of this technology from too much pain. I also hope that the developing USB technology won't follow in CDROM's old path, won't make similar specs like CDROM, but directly support USB sector reading and writing from the BIOS bottom layer like hard disks, so we won't be controlled by Microsoft like CDROM. The fundamental reason why CDROM can't be simply emulated like disks is that CDROM doesn't have a reading and writing standard like int13, thus creating a situation where a so-called driver is needed under DOS to access CDROM sectors. This is a孽种deliberately created by Microsoft's direct participation in CDROM standard making. Its purpose is to enhance DOS's status and belittle BIOS's role. Okay, enough. Below this post is mainly about grub for dos's "memory disk" emulation function, don't talk too much about other things. Friends interested to know can go to http://grub.linuxeden.com/ to see the development page of grub_for_dos-0.3.0. This page is in a stagnant state now, but maybe I'll continue to work on it if I have time in the future.

But blue777, you said that you can load ieldr via grldr under the hard disk to boot the ISO, does that mean booting the ISO of the XP installation disc? I think that's impossible too.

Also, I have a question for you. I downloaded ntfs4dos. I booted the computer with a normal floppy disk and ran it. The logo was displayed, but no matter whether I selected yes or no when choosing whether for personal use, nothing happened, and I still couldn't enter the NTFS partition. I also found that it didn't reside in memory when checking the memory.

In my personal opinion, the access to USB is still quite troublesome right now, and even on the Windows platform, there is a somewhat awkward feeling. You see, Microsoft's official statement is that the current version of Windows does not support booting from USB storage. Although, we can use some special methods to boot Win9x/WinNT/WinXP from a USB flash drive. - My starting point is to make Grub have a device driver similar to that in the Scdrom. If that's the case, I think Grub4Lin by Budian might be of great use. For example, load USB, cdrom, Net and other drivers on a mini-Linux to access numerous storage media, and then use the Ramdisk method to switch from this mini-Linux to other systems (with the development of PC hardware, large memory will surely appear in personal computers. ) ; Moreover, you can review Acronis' products. It is made with fbcon on Linux Kernel 2.4, and has a very beautiful and robust GUI, which is amazing! －－－－－－－－－－ In addition, × I read the post and found that Budian is ill. "Health is the foundation of revolution", take good care of your health! × The problem with ieldr mentioned by everyone may exist or may not exist.

Gandalf:

I missed a sentence earlier, that is, even if the Chinese patch you made doesn't have internationalization functions, it can be released together with grub for dos. I also learned earlier that you don't want to invest a huge amount of effort in development anymore, maybe you have other work tasks. If there is your patch, then Chinese users will welcome it. In this way, I can divide the compiled programs into two parts, one part is the pure English version without Chinese support, and the other part is the version with Chinese support. Now my body is already well, thank you for your concern.

I also want to say something about the problem you just talked about.

I think it's a little different from your view. First of all, how should we view real mode? This is a problem that occurs after the Intel CPU evolves to 286. Before that, it was all real mode, and there was no protected mode. Therefore, the BIOS is designed according to the routine of real mode, and this has become an industrial standard, which cannot be changed casually.

Disk media, optical disc media, USB media, etc. all belong to "block devices", which are all accessed by sectors and have unity. Therefore, the BIOS directly supports them, which is very easy, and this is also the duty of the BIOS. The operating system in protected mode, of course, has a set of brand-new processing, completely getting rid of the BIOS. However, the system in real mode is very compact. Of course, these systems like to use the BIOS. By using the BIOS, these real mode operating systems do not need to repeatedly write these drivers, which has the virtue of "saving". Who doesn't like a system that can be installed on a floppy disk? Although Microsoft tries its best to prevent users from continuing to contact DOS, it can't stop it. This is not subject to the will of Microsoft. People still have to work hard to study the essence of the operating system and will not be tricked by it. Microsoft deliberately makes the operating system huge and cumbersome, the purpose is to create a barrier so that others can no longer easily access the core of the operating system. Take a very simple example, the boot code of the NTFS system has only 7 sectors, but no one can explain its structure clearly. So far, no one has been able to give a clear and complete comment. In this way, we don't even know how NT starts, let alone have a deep understanding of it. --------- Hee hee, this is off topic, let's not talk about it. In short, real mode is still something we can't do without. It is the "introduction" of the modern protected mode operating system. Any operating system enters through it. GRUB exerts its power under real mode.

You said: "My starting point is to make Grub have a device driver similar to that in Scdrom." I also agree, but I also have different views. Device drivers and so on belong to the jurisdiction of the operating system or the BIOS. Although GRUB has many drivers, such as network cards, but this is a last resort, because most BIOSes do not have these drivers. Storage media such as CDROM should not be driven by GRUB. Our precious 640KB conventional memory, if occupied by CDROM driver programs for several KB, is also a不小 loss. If other drivers are added, the loss will be even greater, and if there are more drivers, there will be conflicts with each other, causing various problems such as死机that are difficult to find the cause. Another type of driver that GRUB has is "file system driver", which needs to identify many file systems, so it needs to have these drivers, which cannot be removed because it will not work if removed. But on the other hand, if GRUB can fully drive CDROM, it is indeed a great thing, because this can partially make up for the inherent deficiencies of CDROM and BIOS. However, the current SCDROM module cannot even boot the installation CD of win98, so the road is still long. I think that for scdrom to be finally recognized by everyone, it must support various emulations: no-emulation, floppy-emulation and harddisk-emulation all need to be supported, and technically, it can indeed be done. Any defects are unacceptable to everyone, so if someone complains, it is understandable, and I think so: the complainer is actually also your truster, he has a basic affirmation of your technology before complaining. If he completely negates your technology, then he doesn't need to complain, he just leaves.

I'm sorry, I don't have so much nonsense usually, why do I have so much nonsense today.

grub4lin can start the real mode GRUB under linux. This makes LINUX can be used as a large boot manager. Different from DOS, LINUX is in protected mode. Therefore, grub4lin has indeed solved a not small problem. However, it may not always be possible to enter other operating systems with large memory. We already know that DOS and Win98 can do this, but Microsoft's NT/2000/XP/LH/........ and so on, must not be possible, because Microsoft will prevent people from doing this, it is absolutely unwilling to see its operating system run with a memory disk, because in this way, the operating system cannot record how many times the system has been run, it cannot know when its license should expire, and it cannot collect the real information of users.

I haven't heard of Acronis you mentioned, but I really hope that linux can rise rapidly and reach the level of competing with Microsoft, that would be great.

Hehe, I started using Acronis OS Selector back in 2001, and it was called BootWizard back then. It came out of the same lab as PTS-DOS~~The GUI was so fancy~~~But it never solved the CD boot issue. Maybe as a commercial software, it needs to be more stable.

To hnlyzhd: The grldr can already use a common floppy disk img to virtualize a hard disk partition. The principle is to write a fake hard disk partition table and MBR for the img. I wonder if you can refer to this method to make ieldr boot a common floppy disk iso or floppy disk img as a CD - ROM iso?

The following is a quote from Budian at 13:00:12 on March 24, 2005:
windrv:

Is that so? Can grldr be used in non-emulation mode? How did you do it? You must share it with everyone! So, does that mean stage2_eltorito can be dispensed with?

Dear Tinybit,
According to Bean, he added your Grub4DOS patches into GNU GRUB and did recompilation, such patches will appear in stage2_eltorito. So stage2_eltorito in fact includes grldr .

An Idea: The Linux kernel loading uses real-time memory decompression, and it uses the gzip code. I took a look, and the compression ratio can almost reach 50%; then if the generated code of grldrstart.S is also compressed, considering the 8-sector limit, then the actual sectors we can use can reach 16 sectors after using the compression method. The function of grldr.hdr will be greatly expanded. Of course, we may need to consider the size of the decompression code grldr_decompress() and the actual compression ratio. But in any case, we can definitely get function code of more than 12 sectors. Mr. tinybit, I don't know if this is more helpful for grldrstart.S? In addition, if we implement the same approach for grub's stage2, then this 150 KB code can be placed into a 64kb ROM in a proper way, as a multi-boot environment, or emergency repair - you know, our grub supports network boot. ^_^.