Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:
> On someone's advice, I just deleted qemu-img because I was told I could
> use dd instead.
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=dos.img bs=1024k8 count=10  ??

Remove that stray 8 and it will work:

dd if=/dev/zero of=dos.img bs=1024k count=10

This will be a 10MB empty image. You can either turn it into a virtual
hard disk partition or into a virtual hard disk. To turn it into a
partition, format it (e.g. using mkdosfs), mount -o loop it and use
Steven's suggested '-hdx fat:/hd' method. To turn it into a hard disk,
start qemu with option '-hdx dos.img' and use fdisk and format in the
guest operating system (system inside qemu) to prepare it for use.
(hdx can be hda or hdb, but you probably also want to use the -boot
option to tell qemu which drive to boot from.)

> > Then, you can boot the qemu image with your floppy drive specified as
> > follows:
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------
> > qemu -hda /path/to/dos.img -fda /dev/fd0 -boot a
> > ------------------------------------------------
>
> This boots from a DOS boot disk and then accesses C; as dos.gim?

dos.img will be blank and need partitioning and formatting before use.
(see above)

> Our DOS CAD program loaded but displayed vertical blue stripes over the
> image.  Drmouse loaded and moves around but as soon as you move it the
> screen goes to solid green with a few dots of color.

Try booting qemu with the '-std-vga' option. qemu will then imitate a
standard VGA graphics card, instead of the default Cirrus Logic card.
The VGA card might work better with your graphical programs.

David