Re: Booting with Elks

[David Given <dg@cowlark.com>]

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 6:12 pm, Florian Zimmermann wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> when I try to boot the elks boot disk on my toshiba lt1200
> (8086 cpu, 640k ram) I am getting displayed the error 8000 in an
> infinite loop. I have also tried the comb disk and a self-made
> kernel dd'ed on a disk, with same results :(

At what stage? While the kernel is loading, or later (after the boot messages 
start to appear)?

I've just tested the latest boot disk --- works fine on dosemu, pcemu and a 
real PC. I don't know what the error code is, but it sounds like a floppy 
disk problem. You're not using a 1.44MB formatted floppy disk in a 720kB 
drive, are you?

(First time I've looked at ELKS for ages, actually. Wow, it's come on. It 
actually looks usable! What's the network code like these days?)

> Can anyone point me to where this error may come from?
> What kind of bootloader is used on the elks boot disk? (if any)
> Google and a grep over kernel sources gave no hint to me yet...

IIRC, it doesn't have a bootloader as such --- it uses a variant on big 
Linux's old boot sector system. That is, you dd the kernel directly onto the 
floppy disk; the first sector of the kernel becomes the floppy's boot sector, 
and contains enough code to load the rest of the kernel into memory and run 
it.

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