On Jan 14, 2012, at 5:26 PM, Eric Auer wrote: > are simply too small to be bootable anyway. I wonder if you should be > able to boot from nonstandard sector sizes at all - for example a CD- > ROM does not even have a FAT filesystem, so why would you boot from a > (raw!) CD-ROM then? Booting from cds and raw cd images would be extremely useful. If I had a pure dos system, I'd be more than happy to fiddle with these changes. Problems are, I'm not the worlds best assembly programmer, and I've unfortunately got no way to (currently) test such changes. However, booting from cd should be supported if possible. As you pointed out, the sector size is embeded (or should be) in the boot info, so I see no reason why this couldn't be handled automatically. It can simply assume 512 bytes if no data is available, and then boot normally. I for one would find the ability to boot from different sector sizes useful (as mentioned above), and I'm sure others would too. What we really could use in dos is the ability to designate a drive for booting (like osx has) so you could change your boot drive dynamically during os execution, so if you wanted to boot from second hd or cd, or floppy regardless of what cmos is configured to, this could be done. I realize this would be not a trivial modification, but especially if iso images could be used for this purpose, it would make dos an extremely valuable troubleshooting tool, as well as allowing a person to access all drives regardless of what os / versions might be on them. Plus, the ability to boot from iso images would allow a whole lot of flexibility for testing and other uses as well. I'd of course have no idea how to do such things, but I'm always willing to learn. :)
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