manually installing MSDOS...

[Brad Parker]

"Chuck Guzis" wrote:
>On 3/13/2006 at 10:35 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
>
>>So is there a way of putting the necessary files on there from either
>>Windows  or Linux such that DOS will boot?

aside from the files themselves, you can use the "mtools" from linux to
copy files to the partition.

I'm not sure how to get the MBR installed, but you could "dd" a block
from another disk I guess.

To be honest, when I want to play with dos I use one of the nice X86
emulators like "bochs" and run with a virtual disk (i.e. a file).  It's
much nicer than actually booting dos.  You can set up the mtools
programs to allow you to copy files in/out of the disks.

bochs also lets you debug things like boot tracks and peripheral eproms,
which can come in handy.  I once did a uboot port to an x86 chip and did
95% of the work using bochs.

bochs will boot almost anything, including linux.  I have run linux inside
bochs - it's not bad on a fast machine.

qemu is also pretty snappy.

-brad