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Gecko: success booting FreeDOS

February 05, 2010 — BarryK
Yay, I finally got there!

Thanks for all the feedback guys.

What I ended up doing was using GRUB4DOS. I intended to put in either GRUB or GRUB4DOS anyway, to offer dual booting between the DOS shell and Puppy/Quirky.

Using GRUB4DOS, it was so easy. I booted Quirky 006 and used shinobar's package (which is already in Quirky) to install to the SD card, sda1, which is the little 256MB fat32 partition.

I then edited 'menu.lst':

title Boot FreeDOS 1.0 in sda1
root (hd0,0)
chainloader /kernel.sys


I then placed 'kernel.sys' and 'command.com' from the FreeDOS live-CD into sda1.

Rebooted, it works!

I then placed the 'spiflash.exe' utility and the 'edu.rom' image file into sda1 and ran:

c:\> spiflash u edu.rom

...it returned messages indicating success.

Note, what I'm working toward is to make an image of the entire SD drive, so anyone will be able to install by inserting the SD card in another computer, use 'dd' to copy the image file, then put the SD card back into the Gecko.

Comments

Yes on Grub4dos


GRUB4DOS
Username: BarryK
""considering to use it" ...no, I'm not considering, Quirky has GRUB4DOS, has had for the last couple of releases. I have documented how I made Gecko boot FreeDOS: http://puppylinux.com/baby-laptops/gecko-install.htm Now that my Gecko has the latest BIOS, the apm module doesn't crash. The battery tray applet now "works" -- it remains stuck on 85% always. And I still can't get it to power-off.

Again
Username: BarryK
" http://puppylinux.com/baby-laptops/gecko-install.htm


Tags: puppy