Writing boot loader to Microsoft Virtual PC Virtual Hard Dri

[Mark Ingram]

Hi, im having great difficultly in trying to write my custom boot loader code straight into the virtual hard disk. Has anyone managed todo this already?

I know it is possible, i just dont know how.

Any info on this subject would be most appreciated!

Thanks

[Kemp]

I personally have two virtual machines set up and two hard drives, one with Win 98 and one with my OS.

Machine 1 has both with the 98 disk as the boot disk so I can use the usual tools to write to the OS disk which is set as the second disk.

Machine 2 has the OS disk as the boot disk.

This way I boot machine 1, write the boot sector and other stuff as needed, shut it down (or save the state usually) and then boot machine 2.

[Skute]

Cheers thanks, I was more after a way of "making" a bootsector straight into the virtual hard disk file manually. But ive now resorted to using a Win98 floppy boot disk image, so that i can create a fat12 harddrive and format it etc. Then i can look for the boot sector in the virtual hard disk file and replace it myself. Thanks

[Kemp]

I may be misunderstanding you again, but if you mean you want to write the bootsector straight to the file that's used as the virtual hard drive then you can do this very simply using a hex editor. Simply open your assembled sector and the hard drive file in a hex editor and copy it over.