Has anyone built a tool to install MenuetOS to the hd as the main os? If not, I had a great idea for a basic layout of that tool.

This tool would actually be several tools. The basic idea would be to utilize the hdboot option, but use the hd's MBR to boot the kernel instead of using the FAT bootsector on the floppy. The main tool would first verify that you want to destroy the current data on your hdd (that's right, I said main OS). After this prompt, some code would act behind-the-scenes and format the hdd to fat32(i was thinkin' of using the cool waiting bar from LOADER too ) and then copy msetup.exe to the root of the disk and a custom bootloader to the MBR. Once this is finished, if everything is as close to the normal menuet install as possible, you would remove your floppy/cd and reboot, and menuet would pop up as normal and ask you for your reolution and other options and boot, as normal.
The only problems I'm having with coding this myself is that
A) I'm a complete noob at MenuetOS programming, and even assembly itself(though I'm pretty literate by now, menuet has a pretty simple interface set up for coding the GUI, and I have a couple books that touch on the way assembly and binary programs are executed in general)
B) I don't know how to interface with IDE in assembly. This would be slightly helpful in formatting the drive, writing to the formatted drive, and writing to the MBR
C) There is currently no menuet bootloader meant to reside in the MBR
D) I'm lazy, and there's a lot of things to be done.

So, if anybody with more experience is interested in helping me with this project, please drop me a line so that we can form somewhat of a team. sorry for being so forward and assertive in my first post to a new board, but I'd be really interested to get this thing built and help out the MenuetOS coder society. I thought that this project would also ultimately make it easier to develop for menuet, as it basically sets up a computer as a proper MenuetOS development kit, with a whole hdd to store your projects on.

any way this goes, let's hear it for Menuet!

*edit* I'll write a small paper regarding this and decribing my ultimate design for this program in the meantime and post a link here. tata.

http://menuet.2.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=514&hl=hd+install


many post on this subject but functional hd boot as ONLY os has been here for a long time.

no floppy or cd needed just a FAT32 drive

more info in forums

happy coding!

Gday, Mark

Those who follow the link provided by Mark will need another link to Igor Pavlov's archive decompression executable program, 7z423.exe, available here:
http://www.programmersheaven.com/zone16/cat284/20453.htm

I will try this approach, or zipgenius, from Italy, which decompresses many formats, including 7z:
http://downloads.zipgenius.it/zipgenius/index.htm

to decompress Mark and Matt's version (compressed in 7z) of Menuet, which, according to the link in Mark's post above, permits installation from the floppy, onto hard disk for subsequent booting from hard disk, without further need for the floppy. I am unaware of any link THAT FUNCTIONS CORRECTLY, for installation of Menuet to hard drive on a partition shared with other operating systems, the precise question posed by lordstith. I am curious to study the Russian version of menuet to compare with Bloglite's version, ON THIS POINT: installation of Menuet on a bootable fat32 partition.
Ideally, of course, one would like to have Menuet as one of many bootable operating systems, including various flavors of dos, and windows, and linux with other operating systems, NOT using FAT32, such as SOL:
http://www.oby.ro/os/index.html
http://www.hostileencounter.com/phpbb2/index.php
Happy P R O G R A M M I N G, tom

Thanks, thats pretty helpful, but I think you kinda misread my point, Tom. The idea was just to format the hard drive to fat32, erasing all existing partitions and files, and install the hdboot exe and a small bootloader to the drive. I didn't want it to be on a shared hdd with windows, just on it's own.

Happy programming yourselves!

Still have to write a paper on my version.

Gonna start up a livejournal blog for my Menuet coding endeavors.

used a hex editor to find out where the disk image starts and ends in msetup.exe and am going to write a program that will let you edit/add files <= 1.4mb in a directory, and then package it up into mssetup for quicker booting of custom code(helpful for my plans with the menuet installer)

Later . . .

Well, I think the idea of a disk entirely devoted to Menuet is not unreasonable, but for many reasons, I think it would be even more useful to have multiboot capability, especially to compare, for example, the same program, essentially identical versions, on both (each) of two (several) different OS, one of which, was, naturally, Menuet.

matt9876 has had a quad boot machine WITH MEOS but now only does 3 oses on one pc.

we Do have many machines that use mauto.com to fire msetup.exe to automatically boot meos / no windows ON THESE MACHINES but FAT32 IS REQUIRED.

G'day, Mark

It would be nice to make MenuetOS a 'parasite'. Meaning that we could use existing boot-managers to launch it. (Grub, lilo, NTLDR, config.sys,...)

Scenario:
I just want to listen to a CD, but Windows takes ages just to start up so i boot into menuet. Another time i want to write a document, so i boot into windows because i'm an office junkie.

This way, we can add more & more cool programs to menuet whitout asking the user to 'switch'. After a while (ok, a very long time, if we manage to have a lot of fast, small usefull apps) the user will boot less and less into the other OS.

Of course a full blown 'install' should also be worked on

I use SolOS exactly like that

I have XOSL installed in the boot and SolOS in a small <100M primary partiton with code 0xDD=SolFS.

For "normal money work" I boot Win2k.

However I also boot SolOS once in a while for testing the PCI devices via PCI Enumeration in SolOS or for doing direct hardware work/tests.

I always "smile" when i notice Win2k puts all devices on the same IRQ-11... while i can place them on separated IRQ-s in SolOS.... somebody there must of have been very very stupid to do that in Win2k.

I know sharing works since it works in SolOS also... but still ... I can not play games because sound, network, video and USB all share the same IRQ and this adds latency ...

In win2K I would need a kernel mode driver for direct I/O access and I do not want to "polute" the kernel with too many KMDs

Maybe Menuet can be setup just like that but I guess it would have to use a small FAT16 or FAT12 partition?

As far as vicariously using another bootloader, I fiddled around a bit with lilo as far as booting menuet last night(My main machine currently has Mandrake 9.2, win 2k, two more partitions for other oses at a later date, and an ~ eight gig fat32 partition for documents accesable by most oses on my box) and things aren't going very well. I beleive, don't quote me on this, as i can't quite remember, that my linux partition is formatted in ext3. I created a directory at the root and put all the files from the menuet floppy and a self-ripped image of the floppy. When I try to use the lilo kernel image boot method, I just get a blank screen, and when I use the boot drive/image option, it starts booting and then can't find the kernel. I'm assuming that it's probably because the bootloader in the floppy image is expecting to find the kernel in a fat-formatted directory, so I'll mess with it again(i was reeeally tired), probably putting it on my fat-32 partition. still, any other suggestions?(I'm really just an idea man, i'm not that hot with programming lately, so if i say something *stupid*, have patience, please. you guys have been great )


*edit* oh, and I spent the night before last picking thru msetup.exe and m078.img trying to find where they differ(it took forever, but I did it ) in a highly ironic and sad situation. they tell you on the download page exactly how many bytes in the image is. ah, well, it was still kinda fun!

I have nothing posted, but the main blog for my projects is at www.livejournal.com/users/lord_stith . I'll update you when I have stuff.

I've make a distrib of MenuetOS witch allow HD BOOTING , it use GRUB and a menuet kernel loader called mboot

.the good think is that you can select the kernel simply by edit the configuration file from grub (mboot is loaded as a kernel, and the meos kernel il loaded as a mboot kernel)

see [url]http://xmenuetos.0nyx.com[/url]