OSDev.org

For starters I guess I will describe the situation.

So about a two weeks ago I came across the wiki and have been working in literaly all of my spare time trying to get everything set up. The only thing that I am having trouble with is writing the bootloader to the hard drive. Unfortunately I cannot use floppy disks because I do not have a floppy drive, and do not feel like burning a million CD's. So I just recently came across bootprog and the handy utilities designed to allow writing the boot sector to the hard disk, unfortunately they are failing. Saying that accessing the hard drive directly is not allowed. Here is a quick screenshot of what is going on. And yes I ran both the cmd.exe and the utilities in admin mode.


Any idea of what I can do to write the bootloader to the disk?

First there may be a problem with MBR write. there some rootkits that are spreading and the least windows update made it harder to write to MBR.
I do not use win7 so can not say for sure if this is your problem.
But DexOS also uses bootprog for boot loader.
So you can try the usb formatter and writer app.
The main problem is for safety it need to be formated to fat16.
its designed for usb fobs.
You can get it here: http://www.dex-os.com/dos2x/DexUsbBoot.zip

NOTE: Read the readme txt
and once its put dexos on you can delete it and put your OS on.
You just need to make sure it a mz exe called kernel32.exe

guyfawkes wrote:First there may be a problem with MBR write. there some rootkits that are spreading and the least windows update made it harder to write to MBR.
I do not use win7 so can not say for sure if this is your problem.
But DexOS also uses bootprog for boot loader.
So you can try the usb formatter and writer app.
The main problem is for safety it need to be formated to fat16.
its designed for usb fobs.
You can get it here: http://www.dex-os.com/dos2x/DexUsbBoot.zip

NOTE: Read the readme txt
and once its put dexos on you can delete it and put your OS on.
You just need to make sure it a mz exe called kernel32.exe

Thanks I am trying it now. Although I am not sure if it will work on a hdd, if nothing else I can probably snag a usb and put it on there. The one thing that I dislike is that it needs to be fat16. Currently I have not decided on what filesystem I want, or even have a kernal up and running. Ill post back to let you know how it went.

EDIT: Didn't work on a HDD but works great on a USB. Think I messed something up somewhere though cause my AV was knocked out as well as my internet and some other aspects of windows after trying dexos. Probably something completeley unrelated or me trying something stupid, but required a quick system restore to fix the problem.

sillentthought wrote: EDIT: Didn't work on a HDD but works great on a USB. Think I messed something up somewhere though cause my AV was knocked out as well as my internet and some other aspects of windows after trying dexos. Probably something completeley unrelated or me trying something stupid, but required a quick system restore to fix the problem.

The code for the USBdex is on the site, it seem to be code for usb fobs only, you could change the code to work with hard drives.

The other problem is probably chance, as i have never had a problem and the code is available from the site to check.
http://www.dex-os.com/old/DexSource.zip

guyfawkes wrote:

sillentthought wrote: EDIT: Didn't work on a HDD but works great on a USB. Think I messed something up somewhere though cause my AV was knocked out as well as my internet and some other aspects of windows after trying dexos. Probably something completeley unrelated or me trying something stupid, but required a quick system restore to fix the problem.

The code for the USBdex is on the site, it seem to be code for usb fobs only, you could change the code to work with hard drives.

The other problem is probably chance, as i have never had a problem and the code is available from the site to check.
http://www.dex-os.com/old/DexSource.zip

Yes I didn't think that dexos had done anything wrong. It seems that my little brother was on, and decided to go around disabling and trying to get around the security I put up. But meh, DexOs is pretty awesome. I am thinking that after I learn ALOT mroe I am going to look into joining them, or a similar project. I always loved the Idea of having an OS in my pocket.