Creating a Boot CD: Progress Report

[Mark S.]

Creating a boot CD: Progress report

It's been a week since I have even read anything on this NG. (I will
catchup today.) I have a one track mind and that track has been on this
'CD'. The whole project has been much more challenging than I had first
thought. I was slowly plugging along, trying out various combinations of
DOS, task managers and LFN programs. FreeDOS, DOSNavigator (V3.7) and
DOSlfn (V.33o) all work fairly good together. DOSNavigator together with
DOSlfn; work very well reading and writing long file names on a FAT32
partition. With the adition of Ranish Partition Manager and Partiton
Saving, I can now use only freeware to partition and backup/restore
images. (Tested with Windows 98 FAT32 'C' drive (3 gig used)) Both
Ranish Partition Manager and Partiton Saving are supposed to work with
the NTFS which will be verified at a later time. With the exception of
entering file names from the keyboard, everything mentioned above can be
done with the mouse! There are other things which have been added and I
have more files to find and add, but the biggest hurdle is behind me.

Thank you all for your suggestions and unless there are any others, I
won't have any more to say about this until more progress has been made
(maybe another week).

Mark S

 

[Roger Johansson]

The whole project has been much more challenging than I had first
thought. I was slowly plugging along, trying out various combinations of
DOS, task managers and LFN programs. FreeDOS, DOSNavigator (V3.7) and
DOSlfn (V.33o) all work fairly good together. DOSNavigator together with
DOSlfn; work very well reading and writing long file names on a FAT32
partition. With the adition of Ranish Partition Manager and Partiton
Saving, I can now use only freeware to partition and backup/restore
images. (Tested with Windows 98 FAT32

Sounds great. Do you have plans to make this into a live-CD, and give
the user the options to also install the system to hard disk or floppies
if he wants to?

There is a lot of information on the web about creation bootable CD:s
and Floppy disks. The FreeDos CD iso is one example of such a bootable
CD.

There are also burner programs like Nero which have built-in features to
create bootable CD:s
It is probably not so complicated, I just have not tried it myself.
I can imagine using the Nero bootable CD, with its bootloader, and let
FreeDos command.com take over the command. Maybe there is a need to
create a RAM-drive to run in.

There are probably people around here who know more about creating
bootable live-CD:s.

 

[Rob]

Creating a boot CD: Progress report

It's been a week since I have even read anything on this NG. (I will
catchup today.) I have a one track mind and that track has been on
this 'CD'. The whole project has been much more challenging than I
had first thought. I was slowly plugging along, trying out various
combinations of DOS, task managers and LFN programs. FreeDOS,
DOSNavigator (V3.7) and DOSlfn (V.33o) all work fairly good together.
DOSNavigator together with DOSlfn; work very well reading and writing
long file names on a FAT32 partition. With the adition of Ranish
Partition Manager and Partiton Saving, I can now use only freeware to
partition and backup/restore images. (Tested with Windows 98 FAT32
'C' drive (3 gig used)) Both Ranish Partition Manager and Partiton
Saving are supposed to work with the NTFS which will be verified at a
later time. With the exception of entering file names from the
keyboard, everything mentioned above can be done with the mouse!
There are other things which have been added and I have more files to
find and add, but the biggest hurdle is behind me.

Thank you all for your suggestions and unless there are any others, I
won't have any more to say about this until more progress has been
made (maybe another week).

Mark S

A great place to start is with the Ripcord FreeDos boot disks at
http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/

FreeDOS is pretty sparse. It normally lacks FORMAT, FDISK etc. Start with
the custom "partition resizing" Ripcord Boot disk. It is FreeDOS with
Format, FDISK etc and a great FAT partition resizing program.

Another program you may want to add is FIPS. FIPS is a DOS program designed
to split one big partition into two partitions. See
http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/ I think FIPS is GPL'd.

Besides ranish, you may want to consider adding XFDISK and SPFDISK. Great
partition programs. SPFDISK is great but the English translation needs
work.

I wish I could recommend a free DOS based program to resize NTFS partitions
but I do NOT know of any. The only free NTFS partition resizing program
that I know of only works under Linux. (i.e. parted and qtparted). See
www.sysresccd.org

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Rob

 

[Mark S.]

Roger Johansson wrote to alt.comp.freeware on Sat, 03 Apr 2004 01:24:46 +
0200, the following ...
Sounds great. Do you have plans to make this into a live-CD, and give

the user the options to also install the system to hard disk or floppies
if he wants to?

I had not thought to much about this option yet, since I am still
thinking about what programs to put on the CD, finding them and making
sure that they work ok. It is certainly going to be necessary tro create
a boot floppy from this CD. I used to have a PC which would not boot
from CD but would run Windows 9x ok. An option (script) from the root
directory of the CD Rom is certainly needed in this case to create a
bootable floppy.

There is a lot of information on the web about creation bootable CD:s
and Floppy disks. The FreeDos CD iso is one example of such a bootable
CD.

I have made bootable CDs before but they were for my own personal use, so
it didn't matter what went on them. But this one will ONLY get
redistributable freeware.

There are also burner programs like Nero which have built-in features to
create bootable CD:s
It is probably not so complicated, I just have not tried it myself.
I can imagine using the Nero bootable CD, with its bootloader, and let
FreeDos command.com take over the command. Maybe there is a need to
create a RAM-drive to run in.

RAM-drive: YES. There is even a freeware RAM-driver which is NOT a fixed
size. I have not tried it. It grows and shrinks by how much you have in
it.After my work is done in the yard today I'm going to fidle around with
DOS CD burner/s. I started last night and was able to erase a CDr/w on
the SCSI chain using CDRTools. (lots of documentation to read!)

Mark S.

 

[Mark S.]

Rob wrote to alt.comp.freeware on Fri, 2 Apr 2004 18:49:41 -0500, the
following ...

A great place to start is with the Ripcord FreeDos boot disks at
http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/

For my purposes it is ALWAYS nice to get links to bootdisks.

FreeDOS is pretty sparse. It normally lacks FORMAT, FDISK etc. Start with
the custom "partition resizing" Ripcord Boot disk. It is FreeDOS with
Format, FDISK etc and a great FAT partition resizing program.

Another program you may want to add is FIPS. FIPS is a DOS program designed
to split one big partition into two partitions. See
http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/ I think FIPS is GPL'd. I'll keep FIPS in mind.

Besides ranish, you may want to consider adding XFDISK and SPFDISK. Great
partition programs. SPFDISK is great but the English translation needs
work.

Several Partition Managers:
Yes. You might like program X better than program Y, which I like better
but they both work equally as well. I started reading this newsgroup
about a year ago and one of the things which I like about it is the
number of MULTIPLE solutions which people offer to complete a given task!
At least at this pont I do not forsee space as being an issue.

I wish I could recommend a free DOS based program to resize NTFS partitions
but I do NOT know of any. The only free NTFS partition resizing program
that I know of only works under Linux. (i.e. parted and qtparted). See
www.sysresccd.org

I have this CD also. As far as NTFS goes...
Just have to see where the chips fall. Linux might possibly be a better
solution.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Don't hold your breath. What seems like it should be a simple task takes
hours to complete. After I had FreeDOS setup and working well, I used
Partition Saving to save a 100 Meg partition. That took over an hour!!
So I fideled around with the high memory drivers on FreeDOS and decreased
the time substantially. (I donot remember what the results were.)

Thankyou Rob,

Mark S.