First post, by Irq5
Hey all!
I was tinkering around with building MS-DOS 4 from the released source code with the intent of creating a (eventually dockerized) build pipeline capable of providing some form of bootable install media.
Currently, the easy part is done: from a linux host VM, I use qemu to spin up a Freedos VM that runs nmakr and compiles MS-DOS. The hard part now is figuring out how to take build artifacts (at least io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com) and using those to create a bootable disk image. Using sys.com from Freedos to install the system files doesn't seem to yield a bootable disk; Running sys.com from the build output in a callver 4.00 command.com process seems to have issues interpreting the VM disk images as hardware it can interact with. It seems I need MS-DOS to properly install MS-DOS, and I can't install MS-DOS because yada yada.
The next option I am thinking of is writing a tool that can generate a bootable floppy image from the three OS files (io.sys, msdos.sys, and command.com) by outputting a FAT12 floppy image bytestream, assuming no tool like that currently exists.
Thoughts?
Hoepfully I can go from a bare Linux install to a set of floppy disk images in various sizes containing DOS 4, but we'll see.