Re: Debian-installer, older hardware, boot loaders, miboot & amiboot & ..

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:52:12AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:

> > Huh? Is the bootsector use written in a kind of machine language that
> > the regular as(1) for the architecture does not support? I thought
> > that i386 was the only platform with *that* problem.

> I suppose that the boot sector may contain a bit more than the standard
> elf or coff format. Not sure though.

In the absence of other evidence I'd assume that it's a short fixed
header followed by raw machine code, designed to be loaded at some
magic address and executed immediately. It *may* take a custom ld(1)
script to produce quite the right setup, but after that, getting it
into a usable format should be a simple matter - use objdump and a
short piece of perl if everything else fails.

Google "macintosh boot block" turns up official Apple information that
seems like it might be what you're looking for. (And which it would be
OK to look at for a cleanroom implementor).

-- 
Henning Makholm                                   "Cigarer er fulde af røg."