Re: grub2 boot freedos kernel.sys

[Beeblebrox <zaphod@berentweb.com>]

After giving some further thought to this concept, I am now of the
opinion that it might be a bad idea. The reason is, the USB connection
might get closed-out during the flash by the BIOS, whereas when loaded
into RAM (as ramdisk) there is no chance of the BIOS closing off the
connection.
So flashing the bios from dos-booted USB drive is probably risky.
Thanks and regards.

On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Andrey Borzenkov <arvidjaar@gmail.com> wrote:
> В Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:04:31 +0300
> Beeblebrox <zaphod@berentweb.com> пишет:
>
>> I would like to know if the following is possible:
>>
>> * USB thumb drive has grub-1.98 on hd(0,1) gpt layout (boot-bios is hd0,2)
>> * hd(0,1)/boot/freedos has files
>> autoexec.bat, command.com, config.sys, kernel.sys, sys.com
>> Un-tarred from freedos FDOEM.144 and copied into folder
>> * Boot into USB drive's grub2 boot menu and try to boot freedos by:
>> menuentry "DOS kernel" {
>>    root=UUID=8D40-EC8D
>>    chainloader --ebx=0x0180 (hd0,1)/boot/freedos/kernel.sys
>>    boot  }
>> gives err msg: "wrong signature". Probably expected, since files being
>> booted are for a "virtual floppy", but I also tried it with the files from
>> ke386f32 .zip as well.
>>
>> Q: Is what I'm trying to do possible?
>> I don't want to boot into a ram-limited 1.44 or 2.88 virtual floppy. My
>> purpose for this is to be able to make mobo BIOS-updates (place BIOS
>> dosflash.exe + bios.rom files on USB drive, boot into grub2 -> chainload to
>> dos, mount thumbdrive in dos to make files visible, run dosflash.exe)
>>
>
> If I understand correctly what you are trying to do, the following
> should work:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=USB
>
> It describes how to create bootable FreeDOS USB stick using grub
> legacy which should be trivially extrapolated to grub2.
>
>> I asked this question on the freedos mail list, but they could not help
>> much because of insufficient grub2 expertise. The feasibility of the
>> concept is described here:
>> http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/3612.html
>> I would appreciate some help on how to get this done, or if someone has
>> ideas on how to flash the BIOS using the grub2 menu, that would also work.
>> Regards.
>