Hey guys, Been puzzling over a few things for a boot disk image I'm making. Currently I've got the image booting, select your network card, loads ghost (or whatever I want), all fine.
But, as I'm looking for this to be as automatic as possible, I've been wondering how I can auto detect the network card. Now, I could just have a separate disk image for each card and load whichever is necessary, but I figured there could be a cleaner way. I noticed when I installed FreeDOS that it does a sort of PCI ID detection on the network card drivers, but not all the network cards I'm using have free drivers that load as cleanly as crynwr drivers do. So I tried to use devload to load them up in my detection script, but for some reason devload doesn't quite load them the same way and whatever ghost does to initialize them, it doesn't detect them. So I've had another idea. Seeing as I'm already doing dynamic script rewrites with DJGPPs bash.exe, I could have the image boot up once (using pxe/isolinux + memdisk), do the PCI ID detection, write the appropriate config.sys out, then reload the system without hard rebooting it, keeping the memdisk hooks active and running, so that the kernel reloads and runs the dynamically modified config.sys loading everything cleanly. Anyway, my few attempts at writing a loader didn't go too well. All I was doing was attempting to load the boot sector off the floppy image and then jump to it, but I don't know enough about the various systems (or enough asm) to get this working well and so I was wondering if anyone had come across a program that did this, or if you're able to knock something up really quick (or are up for the challenge or whatever). I've seen similar things done like this before, most notably is the Linux Kernel Module that loads a new kernel image into memory and "restarts" the kernel without hard rebooting (was mentioned as handy for those servers with slow SCSI spinup times). If anyone can help me out, or point me in the right direction for writing my own, let me know, I'm subscribed so if you want to reply to the list as well. (If anyone has any other ideas for loading the network stack that ghost needs outside of config.sys I'd love to know as well, ghost version in particular is 8.2) Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
