Hi, I think the boot.cat file must NOT be empty. It is as needed as a boot sector for a bootable diskette. Without proper boot.catalog, the CD will not be bootable. You can find a 2048 byte boot.catalog file in the root directory of the FreeDOS beta 9 sr 1 ISO image.
The ISO image has some more boot-related stuff in the isolinux directory. The files in isolinux/data are probably the files which are actually used during booting: Info texts, MEMDISK, a logo, and a 360k disk image. Eric ... > > mkisofs -b image/boot.img -c boot.cat -A FreeDOS \ > > -o /mnt/dos/mycdimag -P 'My DOS CD' \ > > -p C_Spitzer -r -V DOSCD -v . > > cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdc mycdimag > > Note that I have left a lot of things that are specific to my system > > like /dev/hdc is the CD burner and /dev/hda1 is my DOS partition. ... > I did figure out one trick there must be a file called boot.cat or > whatever after "-c". So I created a one byte file and mkisofs worked. > ... > Perhaps the solution is a drive switch allowing me to choose between > cdrom, cdrw and both. Is there such a thing? No, you can boot a bootable CD-R or CD-RW in any drive which can read the disk (e.g. CD-ROM drive, CD writer, DVD drives...). But you have to do follow the ISOLINUX install instructions, otherwise it will not boot. Or, if you prefer, the "create bootable CD with plain diskette image without ISOLINUX" instructions, but it is better to use ISOLINUX, as some BIOSes have broken plain-diskette-image support. The mkisofs parameters used to create the beta9sr1 ISO seem to have been: -q -l -N -duplicates-once -boot-info-table -iso-level 4 -no-emul-boot -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -p Jeremy Davis -publisher FreeDOS - www.freedos.org -A FreeDOS beta9 Distribution -V FDOS_BETA9 -o fdbootcd.iso C:\minicd4\ (note that there must be '' around multi-word things on the actual command line, e.g. -p 'Jeremy Davis'...) Note that using -c boot.cat means that you ARE using ElTorito boot style and that you are NOT using plain-diskette-image boot style. According to mkisofs (creates ISO images) help, the boot.cat file is created by mkisofs itself, so you do not have to provide it?? On the other hand, the file at the -b option CAN, it seems, also be a plain diskette image. It is the -no-emul-boot option which tells mkisofs that the -b file is NOT a diskette image. The -boot-info-table means that 56 bytes from offset 8 of the -b file will be updated to match the layout of the particular ISO file which you are creating. The -l -N options are there to allow other filename style than 8.3 plus version numbers, I wonder why they are used. For the BOOTABLE property, only the -boot-info-table -no-emul-boot -b isolinux/isolinux.bin is needed. You can get isolinux as part of the syslinux package, but if you have Linux, you probably already have isolinux somewhere. The isolinux.bin file will look for an isolinux.cfg file in the same directory. For everything else, read the docs or look at the beta9sr1 iso image. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
