RE: Re: Bootsector loader

Hi Eric,

This is indeed an interesting idea!
I'd like to help. I think that ASM would be best (it's perhaps the most
straight forward)...

--Wolf

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Eric Auer wrote:

>
> Hi Wolf, thanks for the efforts, but I think I will change to another
> great idea for the boot menu:
>
>
>  *** the META KERNEL ***
>
> The idea is:
> - use undelete syssave boot x:msdos.bot
>   or some other tool to save the MS DOS boot sector to a file
> - use sys to write a FreeDOS boot sector to your drive, and let sys
>   save a copy to another file, freedos.bot
> - copy /b metakern + msdos.bot + freedos.bot metakern.sys
> - ren kernel.sys fdkernel.sys
> - ren metakern.sys kernel.sys
> - reboot :-)
>
> MetaKern is going to be a small binary building block that gets loaded
> like the kernel. It excepts its last 1024 bytes to be 2 boot sectors,
> and knows how to patch the FreeDOS one of them to load "fdkernel.sys"
> instead of "kernel.sys". It displays a list of the primary partitions,
> plus the entries "MS Dos/Windows" and "FreeDOS". If you select either
> of the last two, it will load the appropriate boot sector into RAM, patch
> it in the FreeDOS case, and run it. If you select either of the primary
> partitions, it will load the MBR into RAM, patch the partition table so
> that the selected partition is the one marked as active (in RAM) and run
> the MBR.
>
> I think MetaKern should be very easy to implement: The only sector that
> it needs to read is the MBR (no LBA needed, no geometry calc needed), as
> everything else is part of metakern.sys and got loaded by the FreeDOS
> bootsector. You need some little "display the menu and allow the user to
> press a key" interface (optionally with highlighting and cursor keys...)
> and some simple "load to 0:7c00 and patch" routines.
>
> The MetaKern will - of course - get overwritten at some time after handing
> over control to the MBR or one of the two stored boot sectors. So it does
> not consume valuxable RAM, it is no TSR or driver, I mean.
>
> I think it would be best to implement this in a few lines of Assembly
> language, but if you are telling me that it is better to do it in C, or
> if you get so enthousiastic that you just write it right away, please
> tell me. Otherwise I will try to write it myself in the next weeks or so.
> Any feedback is welcome.
>
> Eric
>
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