Re: Booting tomsrtbt from Mess-DOS

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 07:53:18PM +1200, Warren Doney wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Sep 2002 07:07, you wrote:
> > On Wed, 04 Sep 2002 00:29, Charles Curley wrote:
> > > Has anyone gotten tomsrtbt to boot directly from Mess-DOS without
> > > building a floppy?
> > >
> > > I have a laptop with no floppy drive and it doesn't boot to the
> > > CD-ROM, so that leaves a Mess-DOS boot.
> >
> > If it won't, it would be trivial to get it to. IIRC tomsrtbt loads
> > into RAM - will be much faster to load it off a HDD with Loaadlin
> > than a floppy. You could use the CD-ROM version with the extras too.
> > Google "ramfloppy" to see how someone else has done it.
> 
> I had to see if it would work.
> 
> bunzip2 tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img.bz2
> mount -o loop tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img /mnt/foo
> mkdir /mnt/dos/rtbt
> cp /mnt/foo/bz2bzImage /mnt/dos/rtbt/rtbt
> cp /mnt/foo/initrd.bz2 ~/initrd.bz2
> bunzip2 ~/initrd.bz2
> (might not need to, I don't recall wether or not the kernel can handle a 
> bzip2 image, it can handle a gzipped one though. Anyhow once it's 
> bunzip2ed, you can mount it on loopback & copy over any add-ons you 
> want to the appropriate place - there's 1700 odd KB of spare space)

You don't need to bunzip2 it; the kernel will do that for you at boot.



> 
> cp ~/initrd /mnt/dos/rtbt/
> cp loadlin.exe /mnt/dos/rtbt/
> 
> Boot DOS.
> cd \rtbt
> loadlin rtbt initrd=initrd root=/dev/ram0 rw
> 
> Works for me. Haven't tested it much though.

I browbeat it into a script, which I'll attach. I won't add it to the
wiki; someone else can do that. There are some definitions toward the
top, which users should change to reflect their systems.

The script builds a batch file and puts it on the DOS partition. You
can change where it puts the batch file, but I wouldn't. If you bypass
the startup files you end up at c:\, so you just type in "tomsrtbt"
and away you go.

The script runs on BASH; I haven't tried it on ASH.

Also, if you hack the batch file generation, watch the dirty trick I
had to use to get Mess-DOS line endings.

If you boot W95/98, you have to hit F8 as soon as Windows boots, then
select "command prompt safe mode" in order to launch to tomsrtbt. You
can have W9x give you a menu at boot time so you don't have to hit the
F8 key. See M$ Knowledge Base article Q118579.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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#! /bin/bash

# Time-stamp: <2002-09-04 21:31:51 ccurley dos.boot>

# A script to build a way to boot tomsrtbt from Mess-DOS. Run this
# from the directory where the image is stored. We do NO error
# checking, so you're on your own. Run as root.

# Some user-definable goodies

RTBTDIR=rtbt                   # The dir in c: where tomsrtbt resides.
DOSPART=/mnt/dosc               # The Mess-DOS partition.
RTBTPATH=$DOSPART/$RTBTDIR     # Where we'll put the bootable tomsrtbt
LOADLINSRC=$DOSPART/dosutils # Where we keep loadlin. Could be anywhere.

# Path where we'll build the batch file. This should be on the path
# once we boot to Mess-DOS. Since you will boot Mess-DOS with no
# startup files, this will most likely be c:\

BATPATH=$DOSPART/

bunzip2 tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img.bz2

# -p so it won't complain if foo already exists
mkdir -p foo

mount -o loop tomsrtbt-2.0.103.ElTorito.288.img foo

mkdir -p $RTBTPATH

cp -p foo/bz2bzImage $RTBTPATH/rtbt
cp -p foo/initrd.bz2 $RTBTPATH/initrd.bz2

cp -p $LOADLINSRC/loadlin.exe $RTBTPATH

# Build the boot batchfile. Note the kludgy way we get the Mess-DOS
# line endings in.

echo -n "c:" > $BATPATH/tomsrtbt.bat
echo -ne "\r\n" >> $BATPATH/tomsrtbt.bat
echo -n "cd c:\\$RTBTDIR" >> $BATPATH/tomsrtbt.bat
echo -ne "\r\n" >> $BATPATH/tomsrtbt.bat
echo -n "loadlin rtbt initrd=initrd.bz2 root=/dev/ram0 rw" >> $BATPATH/tomsrtbt.bat
echo -ne "\r\n" >> $BATPATH/tomsrtbt.bat

# Clean up our act
umount foo

rm -r foo

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