Date: Tue, 30 Nov 93 11:17:50 PST
From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt AT CS DOT Stanford DOT EDU>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Image-to-partition under DOS?

Thanks to DJ, J. Miller, and Charles Sandmann for the useful info that
int86 0x13 (invoke BIOS low-level disk commands) is not in 1.10 but
will be in 1.11 (very soon?  CS thought next week).

While I'm waiting, here's the real problem I'm trying to solve, in case
someone has a suggestion.

I'm trying to install Linux on a Gateway Handbook (2.9 lbs, 486DX2-40,
124Mb HD) *without* the external floppy drive (it's still on order).
Being the impatient type I'd prefer not to wait for the drive if at all
possible.  This means that the installation has to be done in place on
the one disk.  Files can be imported to the disk via the serial or
parallel ports or the PCMCIA slot, but in the absence of the floppy
drive the Gateway can boot only off the hard drive, not even off the
PCMCIA (bummer, I wish).

Using Arno Schaefer's (anyone have his current email address?) lovely
C++ program for splitting one DOS partition into two in place, I was
able to split Gateway's 122 Mb partition into 30+92 leaving Gateway's
MSDOS distribution in place in the 30Mb partition.  I also installed
one of the many available boot utilities in the MBR so I could boot off
either partition---I picked Serge Vakulenko's bteasy because unlike
most such utilities it let you install it from the C: drive, and also
because his documentation was very simple and clear, minimizing the
chance of error.  I did a trial run on a different PC to make sure that
this bit of the Gateway lobotomization would work first time.

I now want to install a small (9 Mb for starters) Linux filesystem on
the 90 Mb partition.  This should be a trivial matter of just copying
an image to the start of this partition.  In Unix one would just dd it,
with no fuss.  MSDOS does not have the concept of dd'ing to a
partition.  That's no surprise, but what is surprising is that neither
do any of my usually helpful resources:

	* The many utilities in SIMTEL's asmutl, at, batutl, binedit,
dskutl and bootutil directories, at least as far as I could tell after
opening up all the promising sounding ones.  dskutl/eddy came closest
with documentation that seemed to be claiming a general
image-to-partition capability, but I could only get it to work for
floppy partitions.

	* Archie turned up one instance of dd.exe but the file turned
out not to be where archie claimed it was.

	* Norton's IMAGE utility is useless for this: it only images
the first few sectors (boot and FAT blocks), and moreover it expects
the image to be of a DOS volume both when creating and reading the
image.

The options I'm aware of at this point are to wait for djgpp 1.11, wait
for the ordered floppy, or buy a commercial C compiler that will
support int86, presumably Borland Turbo C can do this.

What other options do I have?  What would be ideal would be an existing
program that has an image-file-to-partition capability or can easily be
coerced into it.  Anyone have or know of such?

Vaughan Pratt