Subj : 2.88 MB Floppy Operations?
To   : Eddy Thilleman
From : Kris Steenhaut
Date : Thu Mar 15 2001 02:15 am

   Dag Eddy,
dinsdag 13 maart 2001 11.38, Bericht van Eddy Thilleman aan Kris Steenhaut:

 ET> in a true 2.8 MB floppy drive, ofcourse then the 2.8 MB floppy format
 ET> will be supported. But Mike was talking about using the 2.8 MB floppy
 ET> format on a 1.4 MB floppy, and that's I'm very skeptical about if I
 ET> see claims for this, but I never have seen such a claim.

Likely he was confused bout the "real" 2.8 floppy and the 1.8 Mb an XDF-ed 1.4 
floppy can take.
An XDF-ed 1.4 floppy still is an 1.4 floppy, albeit it can take 1.8 Mb 
read-only.
BTW: An XDF-ed 2.8 floppy would take 3.6 Mb read only of course. But here we 
are discussing the angel's gender.



 ET> Or, if your BIOS has support to boot from cdrom, put the eCs boot
 ET> cdrom in a IDE/ATA cdrom drive (attached to your system and turned on)
 ET> and make sure the "Boot from" option in the BIOS is set to cdrom. If
 ET> eCs has the system rebooted to start from its boot partition for the
 ET> first time, set the "Boot from" option in the BIOS to whatever that
 ET> allows that boot partition to be started.

No, no, it wasn't about that I was talking. The eCS GA will have quite a 
different system to boot from CD as the actual beta packets do have.

On the GA cd boot, the whole bunch will be piloted into a RamFS virtual disk. 
Meaning:

1. In first instance will be created two virtual 2.8 floppies, from which eCS 
will do the "three floppy boot". <G>
2. This virtual "three floppy boot" from the two virtual 2.8 disk will end in 
an installation on a virtual Ramfs station Z:
3. Out from this virtual station Z: existing partitions will be updated and/or 
new partitions created/installed.

This trick wouldn't be possible if OS/2 wouldn't support the 2.8 floppy from 
within the kernel, for simply there wouldn't be enough of space for the basic 
drivers. And things would have been rather grim for eCS IMHO. That's the reason 
why I called the "genuine 2.8 floppy" support a live saver. (As is RamFS in 
this respect).

Incidentally, this very week we discovered how to boot from SCSI Adaptecs. 
Finally!


    Groeten uit Gent,

      Kris

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