Floppy Support

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Sun, 4 May 2003 01:25, Duraid Madina wrote:
> > 1. El Torito.  Last I checked, under emulation, 2.88MB was the largest
> > boot image available, so fitting the bootloader/kernel/etc. onto two
> > floppies is still quite significant.
>
> We could use El Torito's "type 4" hard disk emulation. Installing
> FreeBSD from such an environment seems a little gross, but religiously
> mangling kernels to fit onto 1.44Mb floppies seems worse.

I think actually getting this to work is substantially more difficult than you 
make out.

Yes hard disk emulation works but lots of BIOSen don't do it, or do it 
wrongly. They usually say they do it but only if you behave just like the NT 
installer (because NT mandated this feature for certification)

I believe someone did work to try and get this to go but the basic point is 
that 1.44Mb floppy emulation works on a lot more systems and has been a lot 
more widely tested.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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