Scott Dudley writes:
>
>
> Well, as I've had no bites on my boot loader inquiry, I can only assume it's
> not yet been done(?). To reiterate, I'm interested in being able to boot
> ELKS from an MFM or RLL HD without having to boot from floppy. I'm not afraid
> to roll up my sleeves and get dirty if someone will point me in the right
> direction. My assembler skills are rusty (well, actually severely
> deteriorated) but I'll get the job done provided some direction... Any takers?
>
The comb image distributed with ELKS is an example of one of the bootblocks
avaiable for ELKS, but it cannot be used directly for HD boot.
For the full set of minixfs bootsectors see linux-86/bootblocks in the
dev86 package.
To build the bootsector images change to this directory and type:-
make bin
The one required for booting off harddisk is called minixhd.bin, the one
for booting off floppy (as used by the comb image) is minix.bin. Both need
to be copied to the bootsector of the relevant minix fs, and require the
helper code minix_elks.bin to be installed in /boot/boot. The ELKS kernel
then needs to be installed as /boot/linux and the partition should be
bootable.
Here are the commands that need to be typed to install ELKS on
/dev/bda1. (This require /bin/sh as sash does not support redirection)
mount /dev/bda1 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
cp minix_elks.bin /mnt/boot/boot
cp <kernel> /mnt/boot/linux
umount /dev/bda1
cat minixhd.bin > /dev/bda1
Note that the MBR of the disk needs to contain the MSDOS style Master Boot
Record, and the partition /dev/bda1 needs to be marked as bootable.
The dev86 directory contains an alternate mbr in mbr.bin which can be used
if the MSDOS mbr is not already installed.
Al
