Re: VSTa 1.6.5

["Sandro Magi" <naasking@hotmail.com> writes:]

>Working with disk images and bochs is kind of strange because bochs won't
>recognize any partitions when I tried to use a disk image that wasn't set
>the way I sent it to you. I'm pretty sure it's because it emulates a real
>computer and hence requires partitions and all for it's 'disks'.

Yes, it emulates all the way down to the sectors addressed from the IDE
controller.

>So what I had to do to create a useable image was boot into freedos using a
>preloaded freedos image, FDISK the main c:\ image and create a dos
>partition. I then had to FORMAT C: to create a dos filesystem. Otherwise the
>bootloader(GRUB) couldn't find a bootable partition.

I did pretty much the same thing, except using FreeBSD's fdisk (I had to
hack it to operate on a plain file in the current directory). I think I
used the mtools after that to create and populate the filesystem.

>The 'mount' command in Linux provides functionality for skipping the x
>number of bytes that you stripped, so I could mount it directly. it's
>something like 'mount -o offset=8192 10M /mnt/10M'. The offset is calculated
>by the number of used sectors at the beginning of the image(ie. the number
>before the start of the partition), which in this case is 16. So
>16*512(bytes/sectors) = 8192. Then I could load whatever I wanted onto the
>mounted image. The only thing I'm looking to do now is create a FAT32
>partition or maybe even vstafs.

The mtools can handle creating FAT-32... you might check into using them.

>Which brings me to a question which I haven't found answered anywhere in the
>documentation yet: what is the state of vstafs? is it useable?

Yes, it's usable. Not anywhere near as mature as the DOS server at this
point, but good enough to use as a root filesystem and such. With the DOS
long filename support in the latest release, the one big thing vstafs still
has over DOS is that the files and directories support VSTa's protection
model.

Andy Valencia
Received on Mon Nov 27 21:15:25 2000