from http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/
Besides the grub shell in real mode, GRUB for DOS have other innovations. Such as GRLDR, which is the grub console loadable by NT boot manager. Also, there is disk simulation function, which would enable you to treat an image file as floppy/harddisk (it hooks INT13 to do the magic, therefore, it works in systems that honor INT13 drives, this includes all sorts of dos, and in some case, Windows 9X). GRUB for DOS also incorporates some patches to make it more useful. This includes the NTFS patch, which enables grub to access NTFS partitions, and also the findroot patch, which makes it possible to find MENU.LST dynamically, etc.
Advantages:
* Can be launched by NTLDR
* Can be launched from linux with kexec
* Can create ramdisks
* Can use file as well as partition as the source of the ramdisk
* Can be used as a no-emulation-mode bootable CD-ROM boot image
* Has a "Chinese" special build that can display chinese help message at the console
* Add device (md) that can map a specified range of memory as a ramdisk
* Add device (rd) that reflect the memdisk loaded by inited
* Can chainload KERNEL.SYS from FreeDOS
* Can chainload NTLDR from Windows NT/2K/XP
* Can chainload IO.SYS from MSDOS, Windows 95/98/ME
Grub4Dos is a good start point for projects that target special boot projects, here's a couple of links with more informations:
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/
http://grub4dos.sour...s_examples.html
http://freshmeat.net...jects/grub4dos/
UPDATE 20/01/2009:
New site(s):
http://sites.google.com/site/grubdos/
http://nufans.net/grub4dos/
Old releases here:
http://nufans.net/grub4dos/history/