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Finally, I may have some private time to play with my hobby kernel. Currently, my kernel boots from a floppy disk which is formatted as FAT12. Since floppy driver is obsolete, I want to choose another boot media. Here are some options:

  • CD

  • USB disk

  • Hard disk ( this may not be an option because I think the files needs to copied to hard disk from somewhere else )

So, is there any other options? Which one is better? And the reason?

Also, it would be best to list the necessary references.

Many thanks.

I just searhed for the USB, it's daunting. I'll take a look at CD.

But since I am using a virtual machine, and it seems the virtual machine doesn't care much about the actual size of the floppy disk image, so maybe I could just make up a file and use it as if it is a floppy disk image. I think i can even write the FAT32 file system onto it because FAT32 support much more space than FAT16.

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Better SE for this question: unix.stackexchange.com? –  miku Mar 16 '11 at 8:27
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closed as not constructive by gnat, raven, Ziyao Wei, Stony, hohner Mar 11 '13 at 22:38


2 Answers

dude, use virtual machine solution like vmware, virtual box..etc. create virtual disk and do whatever you want on it. use hex editor to write MBR, bootloader on it. quick, easy and best way i know.

i use http://www.winhex.com/winhex/ as drive hex editor [it can edit physical and virtual drives so be careful! yet its very powerful tool]

also check http://www.osdever.net/tutorials/view/hello-world-boot-loader


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You may boot via a network device. The bios has to support this.

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