Booting without DOS

Hi All,

I finally got time (and a working copy of dd under VSTa) to allow me to move
my floppy boot loader code over to VSTa. If you're familiar with Linux
it'll seem very familiar as it's based on the same technique.

I'm not sure if it'll be much use before the 1.4 release as it uses quite a
bit of new stuff and bug fixes that aren't in 1.3.1.

Basically the code creates a bootstrap loader, a setup routine and an image
of the kernel/boot-time servers (much as the current DOS loader does).
These are then dd'd to a floppy diskette which can then be booted. Once the
floppy is booted, the boot servers are started and init will handle the
remainder of the startup sequence, picking up the servers/start-time
programs from the fixed disk.

I've modified my earlier Linux hosted version so that it now defaults to
finding "vsta", "boot.lst" and the boot-time servers in /vsta/boot. All of
this can be overridden, however boot.lst must then provide the full path to
any server/program it's going to run.

I hope to be able to do some more work on booting direct from an HDD in
August!

                Regards,
                Dave
Received on Tue Jul 12 04:44:49 1994