Posted by John Ferguson on 1999-08-12
***James wrote: That is a good question... How could you tell a 'puter how to do something w/o an operating system or any sort of boot disk. I mean start absolutly from scratch... *** This was the first problem I ran into when I was researching OS design. Here are a few sites that helped me out. http://gaztek.tpu.org/osdev/boot/index.html Pretty good info on OS design. I seem to recall the boot section was good. http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigops/roll_your_own/ This site is a "Create your own OS" it has some descriptions of how different architectures boot...and other stuff too. http://www.500mhz.net/ This is called the OS Developers Home Page. It has a lot of links. Be warned most of the info is old, but the stuff I found was good. These sites do a good job of meeting you at your level: if you want all the gory details dive right in, but if you just want a quick boot utility there are several posted, there are also tool kits available to make coding them easier. *** Casey wrote: For example, say I don't have a hard drive or operating system and say I have a program on a floppy disk that I want to run. How do I get my system to boot from the floppy drive and run the program? *** This question is a bit different. If you want to run a program that is aready on a disk, you will have to load the OS it was written for (or an emulator). Normally, this involves "getting" a copy of that OS (be it free/share/$$ware). If this was not a hypothetical question, then it would greatly help to know the nature of the program you want to run and the OS it requires. JOHNF
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