Hello Jerome,
> Without functioning support for the the CD/DVD drive, the CD should > still boot. That is not handled by a CD/DVD driver in FreeDOS. This gives you at least two possibilities: 1. Use the ELTORITO driver for BIOS-assisted access to the CD/DVD drive. It only works after booting from the CD, but that is perfect for installation purposes and has been used in most older DOS ISO. 2. Make the bootable disk image on the CD of "harddisk" type, so it contains the entire set of files needed for installation. As far as I remember, this is what our USB boot image already does. The disadvantage of 1. is that people might be disappointed that CD/DVD access works while installing but not for the installed DOS itself when you later boot from the harddisk or SSD of your computer. The disadvantage of 2. is that it is annoying to have all files wrapped inside another layer of packaging, the disk image. When the boot CD only has a minimal bootable floppy image and all the other files are in plain view on the ISO9660 part of the CD/DVD, it is easier for people to help themselves to some files which they would like to access at other moments, beyond installation. Also, 2. requires you to have enough RAM to fit the entire virtual install disk in RAM, which makes the combination of a "full" install CD/DVD with many packages and an "old" PC with less than 100 MB of RAM problematic. But for those, you can still provide classic-style install CD/DVD instead which have improved chances to find CD/DVD drivers for THAT hardware. > It is handled through the system BIOS and (depending on which CD) > also SYSLINUX/MEMDISK. Once the CD has booted, the installer... ...can always access at least the MEMDISK part. So by moving all package files into the image, you can make sure that you always have access to the files while installing. Solution 2 suggested above. But with the mentioned caveats. I personally recommend solution 1, as that has apparently worked okay for a number of our older distro releases: ELTORITO.SYS :-) > I am not aware of any utilities to support such things under FreeDOS. About GPT: It would be sufficient if the kernel supports it to be able to deal with FAT partitions on GPT disks. Of course you would also want a GPT-aware FDISK at some point and probably GPT-aware USB drivers, but most utilities in DOS do not even know about the existence of the concept of partitions at all, so they would not care which style of partitions you use :-) > RC4 is only days away. It uses a different method when attempting > to initialize the CD/DVD ROM. It will attempt using several drivers. Cool :-) Thanks! Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
