dsc@drutx.UUCP (DavisCS) (08/26/86)
I have a couple of programs that boot from floppy diskette, but apparently do not contain MS-DOS files. It would certainly speed things up during subsequent execution if I could boot MS-DOS, install my ramdisk, transfer information from the program diskette to the ramdisk and then do a "warm re-start" from the ramdisk as if it were drive A:. Is such a thing possible? Thanks, Scott ...!ihnp4!drutx!dsc
bill@hp-pcd.UUCP (bill) (08/28/86)
Not very likely since your RAM disk is installed and runs *under* DOS as a block device driver. Your bootable non-DOS floppy neither knows nor expects anything of DOS; it relies on Int 13h in your ROM BIOS for diskette reads and writes. What you need is some way to catch all diskette drive 0 requests without letting them get to the ROM BIOS (which in turn almost always trys to talk to the "first" mechanical floppy drive). To do what you want, you could do one of several things: * Build a dedicated RAM disk card, containing as much RAM as you feel you need (probably 360K or so) and a BIOS extension ROM to intercept Int 13h calls and, depending on whether or not the card is enabled, access the RAM or pass the requests on to the original BIOS ROM's Int 13h handler. * Create some sort of device driver or terminate-and-stay-resident program that intercepts Int 13h (as above) and sets up and manages its own RAM disk partition, which must be set aside in some relatively safe section of memory. By "safe", I mean that during the reboot process, the RAM occupied by this program and its "disk" buffer must not be stomped upon by memory tests, boot code, stack, or anything else that could conceivably be written into memory while your non-DOS program is loading. This may mean that once you've installed this new RAM disk "driver", it may have to relocate itself to some safer area in memory (good luck finding one). It would also have to be "safe", of course, while DOS is running. In short, you can't do what you want to do -- at least, not in an *easy* guaranteed-to-work-under-all-conditions manner. bill frolik hp-pcd!bill