Jack, >> ==>> so, imho, the drive A: is disapearing when UIDE is loaded. It looks >> like an interaction between the BIOS boot driver that creates A: for the >> CD boot image and UIDE :( > > I wrote UIDE to be a "standard" system driver, not a "CD boot" driver, > and I was unaware that BIOS "CD boot" drivers set the CD to be used as > the A: drive. How they do this, and what hardware access schemes are > used, are unknown to me. So, I am not surprised that the BIOS "boot" > driver conflicts with UIDE, if both run on the same system.
The BIOS CD boot system can be accessed via an int 13 extension so it should be easy to get status information. However, if you look at the (syslinux related) memdisk / isolinux / eltorito.sys driver source codes, you see that BIOSes tend to have (sort of) messy implementations of something which could be easy: You have a floppy image on the CD/DVD and that mimicks, with BIOS help, the A: drive. As it is typically used to boot "big" OSes which do not use much of the BIOS, switching back to accessing actual floppies might be broken. Also, there might be an interaction between whether or not you have an actual floppy drive, too. Alain, a safer way to boot with a virtual boot floppy might be to use ISOLINUX with MEMDISK. The latter loads "like a Linux kernel" (from the view of the ISOLINUX boot loader) and then loads a disk image (e.g. floppy, can even be GZIP compressed etc) and BOOTS it. As booting happens only after loading the floppy into RAM (hence the name memdisk) you do not have to worry about breaking access to the BIOS CD/DVD boot system by loading DOS drivers later. Also nice is the fact that the MEMDISK ramdisk will be writeable, so you can put temp files there. Of course they are lost on reboot. Regards, Eric PS: You can also use the mentioned eltorito.sys driver (tiny) to access the CD/DVD with BIOS support, but as that only works when you booted from that CD/DVD, you may want to ignore this and use UIDE as CD/DVD in all situations, or select in a config sys menu. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What Every C/C++ and Fortran developer Should Know! Read this article and learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help Windows* and Linux* C/C++ and Fortran developers boost performance applications - including clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
