Subject: RE: i386 floppy no longer fits
To: None <perry@piermont.com>
From: Martin Husemann <martin@rumolt.teuto.de>
List: tech-install
Date: 01/11/1999 23:10:06
> Hmmm. That's interesting. Do you know where we can get documentation
> on this?

The El Tority specs (I got mine from http://www.ptltd.com/techs/specs.html
quite some time ago) has five boot modes:

 0 - no emulation
 1 - 1.2 meg floppy (boot image emulates bios drive 0x00)
 2 - 1.44 meg floppy
 3 - 2.88 meg floppy
 4 - hard disk (boot image emulates bios drive 0x80)

Both 4 and 0 may be used for arbitrary sized boot images - 4 will pretend to
boot from hard disk, 0 needs the special access methods defined by El Tority
to access the CDROM.

> Perhaps, but I'd prefer that we only use one mechanism even if we have
> multiple images (as we do already) for maintainability reasons.

Maybe the CDROM falls out of this picture completely - a special CDROM boot
loader will be needed both in mode 0 and 4 above, but then everything else
looks like booting from a hard disk.


Martin