An Odd Problem...

[sneakysh00ter]

So I'm working on 64-bit Windows 7, so VFD doesnt work at all. What I do to prevent that, is rename boot1.bin to boot1.img, then using a disk imager, I copy it to a flash drive. Windows see's the flash drive as a 1.44MB flash drive, so I can tell it gets formatted correctly. Then, I drag and drop the stage 2 loader onto the drive. In Bochs, I set F: (my flash drive) as the bootable floppy and hit go. I'm on tutorial 6, Bootloader 4, so all the program should do is run the bootloader, then load sector 2. The problem is, it can't find sector 2. It says

Loading Boot Image
...................
ERROR : Press Any Key to Reboot

So, clearly the first part worked, copying the boot1 to the floppy drive, because it executed, but then the second stage doesn't load. The main reason this is strange is because it works on real hardware. I tried booting from the exact same flash drive on my netbook, and it found stage 2 fine. Any ideas why Bochs has problems, but real hardware doesnt. Or, does anyone know a workaround? I'd prefer to not have to go through all these steps to just test every build, only on real hardware.

[Mike]

Hello,

If you can, please test the image in another emulator or virtual machine (like VirtualPC or QEMU.) If it works, you may be able to use those for a workaround.

Also, if it does work, it may be a bug in Bochs and I will be more then happy to pass this information to one of the Bochs developers and have it possibly resolved.

[sneakysh00ter]

OK, well neither emulator got me to where I needed to go, but thats ok. Using a tool called BFI ( Build Floppy Image, clever ), I can build an image and even supply the bootloader. This spits out an image which works. IMHO, this is better than drag and drop in Windows, because now I dont need to deal with any emulated hardware, my flash drive or anything like that. Plus, it can be thrown into batch file. If anyone ever has any problem with VFD, I'd recommend taking this path. It works really well.

[Andyhhp]

I'm working on 64-bit Windows 7, so VFD doesnt work at all

Can you explain why it doesnt work?

I have had no problems getting it working

~Andrew