Re: GPT and raidframe aware bootstrap

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> Independent from this: we really should remove dosboo, it has
>>> outlived its usefullness for nealy two decades now.
>> That's a very interesting statement, since I had occasion to use it
>> at work within the last couple of months.

(Okay, I've been assuming "dosboo" is a typo for "dosboot".)

> Wow, you had a working setup for it?  That is ... suprising.  Can you
> share any more details?

Trying to set up a turnkey system for a commercial product I can't talk
about in too much detail at present.  One of the requirements is that
it must be able to boot from a USB thumbdrive to install or reinstall
the software on the machine's disk.  They've been looking for fanless
computers to use, and some of them are remarkably picky about what
they're willing to boot from.  (There are other requirements; not just
any fanless machine will do.)  We've tried something like five
machines, and for one? two? of them, the only way we found to make it
boot from a thumbdrive was a DOS filesystem.  So I put a DOS filesystem
on the thumbdrive with DOSBOOT.COM and an AUTOEXEC.BAT that ran it
suitably, configured a kernel with with root on ramdisk, put most of
the needed data on the thumbdrive out past the end of the DOS
filesystem, and put a ramdisk in the kernel that knows how to find and
use that bulk data to do the install.

It's entirely possible there's some other way to make them boot and we
just didn't find it.  But DOSBOOT.COM did, at the very least, save us a
good deal of stress, delay, and thrashing about until we found that
"other way".

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