To Mike:
Am I missing something in my blissful ignorance of these subtleties? As outlined in the Setting Registry Pointer thread, I have had no difficulties other than occasional difficulties with accessing A:
After reading your reply there i am really puzzled as to why it can possibly work for you
My problems have been explained before, here is my whole procedure.
- I install Mindows on MS VirtualPC2004
- Never added drivers because im still in test stage
- Prepared a MS-DOS7.1 boot floppy image, its really universal so it only fits in 2.88mb, but i doubt the format is making problems
- Prepared a SETREG batch to boot Win
- Burn CD/make ISO: the boot Floppy goes in eltorito "cd boot floppy emulation", Mindows resides on the CD
- Boot: copy Mindows to a XMSDSK Ramdrive
There are actually 2 ways to disable HSFLOP.PDR: One is just deleting it, the other removing floppy controllers in hardware dialog.
If i dont do one of these, Windows hangs at startup usually with the message "error loading DOSMGR"
Important for this thread is that the absence of Floppy drivers somehow disables CD support too. Now the CD is seen as a hard drive (using MS-DOS compability mode), so Explorer crashes, volume tracking doesnt update the CD name, etc..
So my biq question about your fairly stable CD Mindows:
Do you see floppy controllers + CD drive listed in your system? (neither for me)
Can you browse and dirlist your CD in Explorer?
To jaclaz:
I start to fancy the the memdisk-driven boot, i was looking into another approach:
Panasonic distributes with their USB drivers RAMFD.SYS, intended to copy a usb boot floppy to ram + swapping drives so the user can attach a USB CD at the same port.
Works great for CD-boot too - the catch: claims to, but wont support my 2.88mb image.
Subst'ing has proven to be sub-optimal: on my old system with a real floppy present, its till no change but whats worse is that windows corrupts the emulation, removing the Subst after Windows exit leads an empy A: drive.
Im really unsure if i should open the bootloader can-of-worms.
Flo