On Fri, Aug 16, 2002 at 04:00:12PM -0400, Rob Quinn wrote:
> > For example, I have old CD drives that aren't bootable, so I want to be
> > able to use a floppy that can support something like: "boot cd0a:netbsd".
> 
> [...a blatant attempt to engage someone....]
>  I think we need the solution we were both asking for a few months ago - a way
> for a small kernel on a floppy (or el-torito fake floppy) to replace itself
> with a new kernel from another device, say cd0a:netbsd.  Otherwise it's hard to
> make a boot CD with bulky kernel options like IPSEC.

It ought to be possible to write boot code that would access the
main IDE controller directly (in PIO mode without interrupts).
This would allow you to boot from partitions that are beyond the
bios limit, and to be able to access atapi devices.
Unfortunately accessing additional IDE devices would be harder,
and SCSI out of the question.  I'm not sure there is space in
the mbr_bootsel code for CHS, LBA and 'direct' disk transfers!

OTOH the 'boot' program does have space once it has read all
of itself in.
You would also need to add the code to parse the CD filesystem.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk