Re: [mobius-development] CVS update

[Tim R. <ti...@ga...>]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002 18:43:44 +0530
"prakash saivasan" <hel...@ho...> wrote:
| I actually want to have mobius OS in a floppy . I do not have a test syst=
em=20
| that I can dedicate to mobius. So I want to boot into mobius through a=20
| floppy.

Then it should be enough to prepare a FAT-formatted floppy disk with
GRUB on it. What you need to do is:

1) Get a copy of the GRUB binaries from, say,
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
2) Copy stage1 onto the boot sector (sector 0) of a blank floppy disk
using, say, dd
3) Copy stage2 onto sector 1 of the same disk
4) Format another disk as FAT (ext2 works as well
5) Copy stage1 and stage2 (and, optionally, menu.lst) onto the FAT disk
as files
6) Boot from the first disk; the GRUB command line will appear
7) Swap disks; put the second disk in the drive
8) Type the following command:

install (fd0)/stage1 (fd0) (fd0)/stage2 (fd0)/menu.lst

(There is a better GRUB tutorial at http://osdev.berlios.de/grub.html.)

This installs the stage1 and stage2 loaders onto the second disk using
menu.lst as the menu which will be used. I don't think menu.lst needs to
be there at the time; if it's not present at boot time you'll get the
GRUB command line. You might want to mark the stage2 file as system,
hidden and read-only, since the only way the boot sector has of finding
it is through a block list (if the stage2 file moves the block list
doesn't get updated). You can delete stage1 from the disk, however.

9) Now the second disk will be a FAT-formatted disk which will boot GRUB.

To boot M=F6bius from that disk:
1) Copy kernel.exe, system.pro and any drivers that system.pro
references onto the disk
2) Add entries in menu.lst for the files you just copied; for example:

default 0
timeout 5

title The M=F6bius
kernel /kernel.exe
module /system.pro
module /keyboard.drv
module /tty.drv
module /fdc.drv
module /fat.drv
module /shell.exe
module /libc.dll
module /libsys.dll

3) Modify system.pro so that the file systems you want mounted get
mounted; for example:

key Devices
    0=3Ddevice,tty,tty0
    1=3Ddevice,tty,tty1
    2=3Ddevice,keyboard,keyboard
    3=3Ddevice,fdc,fdc0
    4=3Dmount,fat,/floppy,fdc0
end

Shell=3D/System/Boot/shell.exe

There are working menu.lst and system.pro files in the CVS you can
modify. I've tried the ones I've listed here and they seem to work fine.

Support for floppy disks is a bit ropey: the file system drivers don't
know when you change disks, so they cache the old data even though a
different disk is in the drive.

Once you know that all this is working, you might want to install the
Mobius files onto a directory on your hard disk and boot from there.
Doing that should just be a matter of keeping just menu.lst on the
floppy disk and changing the path names to refer to the hard disk.

--=20
Tim Robinson <ti...@ga...>