Questions on tools.

[Griallia]

Well, before I get flamed for not looking on the wiki...

All the tutorials I found was only on putting the OS onto a Floppy drive...
I got NASM, my Assembler of choice.
I'm looking for an Emulator too, but found that they all use floppy images.

Long story short. I'm on a laptop, with no clue on how to create blank floppy images, and would like to find a way to stick this stuff onto a CD.

[Brynet-Inc]

Well, before I get flamed for not looking on the wiki...

All the tutorials I found was only on putting the OS onto a Floppy drive...
I got NASM, my Assembler of choice.
I'm looking for an Emulator too, but found that they all use floppy images.

Long story short. I'm on a laptop, with no clue on how to create blank floppy images, and would like to find a way to stick this stuff onto a CD.

I struggled to find the question in your question...

All available emulators, QEMU/bochs.. and even the proprietary ones, support El Torito ISO images.

As for creating disk images, this is also on the Wiki.. utilities are available on almost every operating system.

[Alboin]

I would suggest using a floppy until you actually need the space that a CD offers. Floppies make one's life simpler, and, when you're doing osdev, that's something you'll long for.

Your best bet, as previously said, is to check the wiki.

[bewing]

But he doesn't HAVE a floppy -- that was his point. He would have to use a floppy image in an emulator. Which is silly, when you can use a hard disk image just as well.

My preference is -- if you have the ability to do it -- to create one more tiny partition on your laptop HD, and then put a dual booting MBR in your main partition. Then you can do all your OS development for real on the tiny partition. If you are using a *NIX, you can use that partition inside an emulator, equally well.

[Griallia]

Thanks.

*sigh* I guess I'm going to have to read all of that crap in the end. lol. Even though that was still a google away.

[brickhead20]

It is perhaps easiest to use GRUB with a CD. If you get yourself the stage2_eltorito file, and follow the instructions in the GRUB manual, bootable CD's are easy. You can also use them with for example qemu, by using the -cdrom image.iso flags to load the iso image as an emulated CD-ROM. Then if you want to test it "for real" you can burn it to a real CD. Of course to read it you need to develop an ISO filesystem etc. but its fine to start with.

Hope that helps,
Richard

[Griallia]

I decided to take on the odds.

Making my own boot.img, turns out, after reading the El Torito stuff like I should have, a week ago... It solved every single problem I have.

Now I feel like bashing my head into my monitor for being an idiot. But of course, lets save that when I get to the kernel debugging. lol.