China DOS Union

Thanks

GRUB for dos 0.2.0pre12 has good support for NTFS. After so long - term testing, it can be said that there are not many major problems. Almost all the problems that have been discovered have been solved.

GRUB for dos supports emulating any size of img. As large as your real hard disk is, it can support that size of img. To be precise, it supports an image as large as 2 to the power of 32 sectors, or roughly speaking, an img of about 2000GB. Usually, you don't have such a large img file.

1. Is there any way to make GRUB support booting.ISO files placed on the hard disk?
2. Also, which parameter combination can make stage2 the smallest? I tried some parameter combinations under Linux, and it is still 140K in size.
In addition, the NTFS format cannot use./config --disable-ntfs, otherwise the compilation will not pass.
3. How to install GRUB for DOS in a 2.88M floppy disk image.
It's okay in the 1.44M one, but when doing setup (fd0) for the 2.88M one, it prompts that the stage* file cannot be found.
Using ramdisk + virtual pc. I don't know why it just can't be installed.
Expanding the 1.44M one to 2.88M with winimg can't boot. I wonder if there are any successful examples.
Thanks

1. There is currently no function to boot ISO. In the future, the function of emulating CDROM with ISO might be added, but the technical limitation is that programs in ISO must use BIOS to read CDROM and cannot use drivers.

2. This issue has not been studied.

3. You can use GRLDR to achieve the purpose. For how to install GRLDR to the hard disk MBR and the floppy boot sector, please refer to previous posts, or you can also find it by searching on Google, or it is also available on grub.linuxeden.com.

Hello, it's quite difficult. I don't know what to use to read the sector. I tried Google, and it seems to be using debug, but I don't know how to operate. Can you give an example?

Also, can the disk made this way discard stage2?

2. Using grldr

Place the modified fourth sector of GRLDR into the first sector of the floppy disk, and then copy GRLDR to the root directory of the floppy disk.

The specific steps can be as follows:

a. Format a floppy disk in FAT format, or use any existing formatted FAT format floppy disk.

b. Read the first sector of the floppy disk into memory area 1, and read the fourth sector of GRLDR into memory area 2.

c. Copy 60 bytes from 0x02 to 0x3d in memory area 1 to 0x02 to 0x3d in memory area 2.

d. Write the modified memory area 2 to the first sector of the floppy disk.

e. Copy the GRLDR file to the root directory of the floppy disk. .

The above assumes that the floppy disk is in FAT12 or FAT16 format. If the floppy disk is in FAT32 format, then the above steps b and c need to be rewritten as:

b. Read the first sector of the floppy disk into memory area 1, and read the third sector of GRLDR into memory area 2.

c. Copy 88 bytes from 0x02 to 0x59 in memory area 1 to 0x02 to 0x59 in memory area 2.

Yes, only GRLDR is needed. The executable code of GRUB is all in it, and there's no need for STAGE2 and so on.

The problem of how to read and write sectors, you can figure it out by yourself. It can't be explained in a few sentences.