14 Mar
2006
14 Mar
'06
12:34 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
IIRC, the only thing about IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS
entries is that they must
lie in the first directory sector and should be kept as contiguous files.
You can copy them over to the partition yourself, making sure that the boot
sector information is correct for the partition type (FAT32 partitions use
different boot code than FAT16 ones).
Hmmm, that's the bit I'm missing - the boot sector code. And I can't figure
out a way of creating it (short of hand-crafting it) without having a DOS
floppy to boot from on a floppy drive that I don't have!
(Unsurprisingly, Linux's FAT filesystem creation tool can't create the boot
sector, and nor can Win2k's)
I don't particularly feel like hand-crafting it myself; hazy memory says that
there are various partition geometry details in there (rather than DOS just
getting the info from the MBR) - get that wrong and I'd hose the whole disk...
Time to look at other options I think!