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[3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org]

NoImAFungi AT aol.com wrote:
>
> Regarding the dos boot disk I have two problems.  The 
> first is that my boot cd won't give me hard drive access. 

You don't need HD access (once the CDrom is written).  
If you have a bootable DOS filesystem on the CD, you 
can run everything from the CD.  No HD required.

> However the larger problem is that I would like, if possible, 
> to have a set up like the floppies where one can boot it without  
> having any files previously put on Hard Drive. 

This is easily done with BL1 or BL2 (because they were designed 
to run in ramdisks).  So you can put the kernel and baslinux.gz 
on the CD where loadlin.exe boots them into a ramdisk.

BL3 is different.  The DOS version runs in a loop-file on the
HD.  Moving the loop-file to CD won't work.  The floppy version
of BL3 does run in a ramdisk (two ramdisks actually), but it is
not configured to run from DOS.  I would need to repackage it
to get it in a form that could be put on a CDrom.

> When i run BOOT.BAT from just the cd it looks for file system 
> (fs.img I think) 

fs.img is the loop-file.  It holds the BL3 filesystem.

> on hda*. 

The booting routine looks for fs.img on the HD.  That's just
one problem.  There are also problems caused by the read-only
filesystem on the CD and by the inability of the BL3 kernel to
read a CD (until it gets the necessary insmods).

> I figure this is because it wants the  baslin directory on the 
> HD. Perhaps I misunderstood your directions any  suggestions?

Sorry.  My previous reply was rushed and I did not think it
through properly.  BL1 and BL2 were easy to shift from HD to
CDrom, and it wasn't really an issue until now.  I now fully
reaize how awkward BL3 is to move to a different medium.
  
Simple answer:  use BL1 or BL2 for CDrom.

Cheers,
Steven