From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stas Sergeev Subject: Re: files as harddrives? Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 22:17:00 +0400 Sender: linux-msdos-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3F1ED11C.2040308@aknet.ru> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: linux-msdos@vger.kernel.org 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.