Hi Eric, >> Hello, >> >> I am in such a way of fast booting. I am currently using a motorola >> board >> with a celeron 566 on board. I am wondering if it is possible to boot >> windows or dos instead of linux?
EWB> Is it possible. Yes. Has anyone done the work no. EWB> If you want to you can write a LinuxBIOS bootloader that is good EWB> enough to boot dos, or if you have access to the source you can port EWB> windows... EWB> Being able to boot dos is a well understood problem, from the Linux EWB> dos emulators... EWB> As far as I can see no one is really interested in booting dos at this EWB> point. I do not know the exact steps from power on to os login, but I think every user of normal BIOS is frustrated about time until OS booting begins. It takes about 15-30 seconds until BIOS is ready and LILO, GRUB, ... is loaded. And than the OS is loaded. Think of a possible situation: - Power On - 0.5 seconds later LILO prompt - Booting windows from hd (normal speed on hd) - normal boot code from os - normal installed windows - Booting linux from MTD flash (high speed) I think that the INT functions from the normal BIOS code is the real problem to port this kind a project for other OS. Older Windows are based on DOS and that is based on BIOS INT functions. So here you have a problem. But why not thinking of BSD, Solaris (Intel), BeOS or some sort of Unix/Posix variant. They do not need the BIOS much. So the BIOS startup time can be minimized. I think it would be nice for every computer user to speed up the complete process from power on to windows login, bash prompt, ... . Measuring time needed for complete process, it clear that the OS only needs about half the time to load and the other half is the BIOS. About double speed is much time you save. What is the problem booting other OS ? The lack of BIOS INT functions ? Do actual OS like W2000, XP, ... need them as DOS did ? ciao. Stefan
