First post, by mike_canada
I'm making a project for an old computer. So far I am able to make the CD boot on the computer like a floppy disk by inserting a pre-made image found at https://www.allbootdisks.com/ into the CD ISO via a Linux CD burning program, K3B.
Here's the sad part. I'm limited to using only 1.4MB off the entire 650MB CD. Why? because I haven't figured out how to make a boot image of a hard drive (instead of a floppy), and the CD-ROM drive is external and attached to the computer and no DOS CD-ROM drivers work with it. And this isn't an ordinary computer. It's a DELL thin client machine.
Now making a hard drive bootable image from scratch is tough and I'd like help doing it.
So far, I did create a 256MB image file by executing this in linux:
dd if=/dev/null of=image.img bs=1M seek=256
I can control what files are in it using linux mount. I can partition it as a FAT16 or FAT32. I even used mkdosfs (mkfs.vfat) to try to make it a DOS based file system with a 256MB disk.
I tried to see if I can do anything in DOSBOX to make the image file a bootable hard drive image for the CD, and I have no luck with the IMGMOUNT command.
I also have mtools package installed for linux but the mformat command is risky because it expects me to use a drive letter as a parameter and linux doesn't use drive letters.
Perhaps there's a unix utility I need to download and use to make the image as bootable so when I put the CD in the non-bootable computer, it will boot as if the computer is booting off from a second hard drive instead of a floppy disk.
Any ideas on how I can solve this?
