Re: files as harddrives?

[Stas Sergeev <stsp@aknet.ru>]

Hello.

Bryan Stillwell wrote:
>>> It may be easier to think of it as a hard drive image
>>>  (actually compact flash image) with the boot sector
>>> and partition information at the front of the file.
> AFAICT, dosemu used to support this behaviour with the
> wholedisk option on older versions, but that
> functionality has been removed
I don't think it was removed. It is more
like it was disabled in global.conf.
A quick hack, such as modifying the line
650 from "disk { image $yyy }" to something
like "disk { wholedisk /dev/hda }" will still
work if you cheat dosemu by setting $_hdimage
to an existing image so that this line in
global.conf is reached.
However, what you do you'll still not be able
to achieve. Dosemu needs to get a disk geometry
before it can work with it as a wholedisk.
It uses a HDIO_GETGEO ioctl command for that.
This is not possible to do with an image file,
therefore the image file must have some kind of
a header to provide a geometry - that's why the
mkfatimage16 exists.
So mainly, it seems if you do a simple image
file from your flash drive, there is not enough
info to get any use of it - the geometry is also
required.