Re: [Freedos-user] Prevent boot from Floppy?
Sun, May 20, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Wolfgang Schechinger hubah...@gmx.de wrote: Der experts, may I ask another question: Is there a way to make FreeDos ignore that there is a floppy present upon boot, i.e. force a boot from the harddrive? Again only a problem when running it in a VM, I think, as on a hard PC, you may set the boot options in the BIOS. Hi. The best option here is not to do this at the operating system level, but at the BIOS level. You mentioned in your email that you can set the BIOS options when booting on a hardware PC. That same BIOS option exists in true virtual machine emulators. If you are using VMWare, VirtualPC, Bochs, or some similar virtual machine emulator, you will have a BIOS present in the virtual machine. When the VM boots, you should see a message to press a key combination (usually f11 or f12) that will bring up the BIOS setup. If you are using a different virtual machine emulator that does not provide a BIOS (such as DOSEmu) then I'm not sure what you can do to ensure FreeDOS boots from hard drive instead of floppy drive, other than not mounting a floppy image on the emulator when you boot it. I hope that helps you. -jh -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Prevent boot from Floppy?
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Wolfgang Schechinger hubah...@gmx.de wrote: Hi Jim, your suggestion helped: The boot screen (when booting FreeDos in VirtualBox) normally disappears so quickly, that it actually doesn't show up (visibly) unless you press F12 while launching the VM. This made me realize that I actually need to find a solution to (force to) drop any mounted floppy image before the VM is booted, to prevent that the floppy's boot sector is executed. That's what I actually need. Best reagrds, Wo Glad that helped! You might consider simply removing the floppy image from the virtual machine definition in VirtualBox when you don't need to boot from floppy. Or, you may want to adjust your BIOS boot order, so that floppy appears after hard drive. When I've worked with virtual machines, that's usually one of the first things I do: set the VM BIOS to boot from hard drive first, then CDROM, then floppy. That way, when I boot my fresh virtual machine using a mounted CD image of FreeDOS or Linux, it boots the CD first (because the hard drive doesn't have anything on it yet, no boot loader.) After the installation is done, if I've forgotten to unmount the CD image from the virtual machine, it doesn't matter because the VM will boot from hard drive anyway (because it now is a valid bootable medium.) -jh -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Prevent boot from Floppy?
At 03:10 PM 5/20/2012, Wolfgang Schechinger wrote: Der experts, may I ask another question: Is there a way to make FreeDos ignore that there is a floppy present upon boot, i.e. force a boot from the harddrive? Again only a problem when running it in a VM, I think, as on a hard PC, you may set the boot options in the BIOS. Try to think about this for more than a second! How is FreeDOS supposed to decide from which media it is to be booted? (You have heard about the chicken and egg problem before, haven't you?) Ralf -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Prevent boot from Floppy?
Op 21-5-2012 0:17, Ralf A. Quint schreef: Is there a way to make FreeDos ignore that there is a floppy present upon boot, i.e. force a boot from the harddrive? Again only a problem when running it in a VM, I think, as on a hard PC, you may set the boot options in the BIOS. Try to think about this for more than a second! How is FreeDOS supposed to decide from which media it is to be booted? (You have heard about the chicken and egg problem before, haven't you?) As Ralf implies, the boot order is something specified by the system firmware (BIOS) that's part of the system environment. In other words, set the boot order in the virtual machine's BIOS (for example F2 in VMware). QEMU uses a batchfile I think (for Windows at least) to specify bootorder (passed on to SeaBIOS), Bochs uses some config file. No idea about VirtualBox though. QEMU is a bit troublesome to learn though, so many options. QEMU Manager is a nice GUI in VirtualBox-style but is a bit older and uses older QEMU versions. Worst coming to worst, you can: 1) remove the floppy drive alltogether from your virtual machine 2) setup a bootmanager on floppydrive (MetaKern for example, or Grub) 3) setup a bootsector to diskette that chains to harddisk. If the VM's BIOS is smart, you can disconnect the contents (image file) from the virtual floppy drive and thus next boot device (harddisk) will be considered. Or maybe it tries floppydrive but only finds a non bootable disk there so jumps to next boot device (harddisk). -- Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
