Hi Bernd, thanks for explaining why 55AA should not be removed. How about having all 1-4 primary partitions marked as non-bootable partitions instead?
... we can not expect the INT 18 to work in all cases, we should add a few safety nets: - Check if the INT 18 vector contains a sane value - Display a message and wait a few seconds before issuing the INT 18 - Expect that the INT 18 might return - ...
While one could try to boot the next drive number or use int 13.4a to 13.4d to boot from CD/DVD and so on, I guess it would be useful to look at some other open source boot managers to see how they "boot the next bootable thing". A completely different strategy would be to make sure that, as soon as a FAT partition is created, it does get formatted, SYSed and marked as bootable, even if DOS is not yet completely installed. Instead, a BAT file could load CD/DVD drivers and search for the CD to continue installation for people who happen to did a premature reboot? On the other hand, a purely USER based install strategy would be very foolproof on the SOFTWARE side: Tell the user to select the CD/DVD as preferred boot disk. Insert install CD/DVD, boot from it, start install. Rebooting will keep booting the CD/DVD until the USER is told that installation is complete and the CD/DVD can be removed to boot the installed system from C: from then on :-) I guess have not understood the strategy and background? Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
