Re: Unattend over network with USB boot device

From: Gerry Hickman (gerry666uk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 03/20/04 

Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 22:08:40 +0000

Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:

> But DOS has a special relationship with the BIOS, since in effect it
> uses the BIOS as its HAL. Every interaction DOS has with disks, from
> enumerating them to reading/writing them, happens through the BIOS.
>
> I believe the BIOS will always treat the boot device as "disk 0"

Ah, I see what you mean.

> (aka. "disk 80h in the INT13 interface"). So when DOS enumerates the
> disks attached to the system, the boot drive will always appear first
> on the list. And if the drive has an active FAT partition, that
> partition will be C:.

Maybe we could write an ASM program to hack the drive letters? Another
option is to simply copy everything from the memory stick to the real C
drive, then reboot. It could then load network drivers, and fire up
WINNT. Unfortunately (even if it worked) it would leave some nasty
legacy files (IO.SYS, COMMAND.COM, network drivers) sitting on the boot
drive.

Here's some info on the DOS ASSIGN command.

http://www.easydos.com/assign.html

> for $50 I can get a 256M USB 2.0 stick (mail order) which should last
> me for a long time. Except I have to wait for it.

True, but you really need a dedicated stick JUST for booting. I've got
two, small one for booting, and a 256Mb for storing stuff. 

-- 
Gerry Hickman (London UK)

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