Re: (alpha) YES, we have working boot-floppies

[Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Stefan Schroepfer <whoknows@onlinehome.de> writes:

> Goswin Brederlow wrote:
> > 
> > It also seems that (at least ruffian) needs a x86 bootsector on the
> > floppy to boot it (the bios says the OsLoader path is invalid
> > othervise). I tried using boot-text.b from lilo, which works fine.
> > Any other archs that need this?
> 
> Goswin: We are talking specifically about the Milo floppies
> here, right?
> 
> [Goswin, I re-read your mail and do answer a second time,
> sorry to all recipients for this inconvenience.]
> 
> AFAIK, all useful Milo floppies do have to be DOS-comformant
> in the "file system" sense (FAT). I am just not sure if this
> answers your question or if there are other wrinkles in the
> "x86 boot sector" you asked for (or even worse: "Ruffian-only"
> stuff).

Its not just FAT, Ruffian at least needs a real x86 boot sector.
Otherwise the disk is not recognised as bootable and booting is denied
by the bios. Same with the harddisk, the bootable flag must be set on
the milo partition.

Don't ask me what an Alpha wants to do with a x86 boot sector, the
bios just insists on it.

> Again, AFAIK, all non-SRM systems (may it be ARC, AlphaBIOS
> or even ARCS BIOS) do not "know" anything other than FAT to
> boot from, and boot floppies are of most interest for people
> who do run such non-SRM systems.
> 
> To be fair, I must admit that all my current Milo testing on
> PC164 and 164LX was made by loading Milo from hard disk (you
> guessed it: from a FAT formatted partition).

With or without the bootable flag set?

MfG
        Goswin