T23 BIOS update as bootable CD ?

[Kaervak]

Oooh, that's an interesting ISO. I'm going to have to play around with this one for a bit.

k3b shows it as being created by Nero. After checking the ISO with ISOBuster, its rather interesting. seems the IMG file of the T2x boot disk is embedded into the boot sector area and is named Arnes Boot Record which is something nero does. Here's a screenshot of what ISOBuster shows: http://home.roadrunner.com/~kaervak/snapshot3.png

This ISO is rather interesting as it's accomplished exactly what I'm trying to do. After extracting the Arnes Boot Record and loading it as a virtual floppy it's all the T2x PC Doctor disks merged into one bootable img file which is exactly what we need. Man, I'd love to talk to the guy that created this thing.

[rkawakami]

Yeah, that's about the same reaction I had last year when I was looking into this project. I'm currently trying to use Nero to burn a PC Doctor A2x floppy disk set. I've created a temporary directory and am xcopy/h all of the floppy files into it. The plan is then to use Nero's "Make Bootable Disc" function. At the moment I'm not going to worry about editing the autoexec.bat file to eliminate the "load the next floppy" routine; I just want to see if this works.

BTW, I'm using the A2x PC Doctor program simply because I don't have a floppy set for the T2x systems around here...

[Kaervak]

Loaded the Arnes Boot Record img file in virtualbox and its not bootable as I had thought. I think Nero is the key to getting this thing working. It has an option for floppy emulation in it's boot settings and that must be how the merged files behave properly and don't ask for you to insert the next disk to continue. I'll have to try this out on my physical windows system in the morning and see what happens.

[rkawakami]

The T2x PC Doctor .ISO *does* still prompt you for the "next" floppy; that's the whole reason why I wanted to re-image it in the first place.

I made the A2x .ISO and booted it in an A21p. The first floppy loads in and then hangs at the "Press any key" prompt. I CTRL-C'ed the batch file and looked at the disk and there's only 1.44MB worth of data. Looking at the disk under Windows and all 3+MB is shown so I'm thinking that the floppy boot image I'm supplying to Nero is limiting the amount of disk space that's seen when the CD is booted.

[Kaervak]

Tried a few things with Nero and nothing. I have no idea how to get this working, but it is possible. If we could just get our hands on the utility that IBM uses to create these disks or something similar, problem solved. I'll keep looking for a solution, might get lucky.

[rkawakami]

I've been working on this with Nero and Easy CD Creator 5 all morning and nothing seems to be working. For the times that I'm able to boot the CD, it's limited to 1.44MB worth of information (using an original A2x PC Doctor floppy as the boot image source). I'm currently trying some tool inside EasyBoot which is supposed to increase the size of the disk image.

[Kaervak]

Look what I found http://forum.winimage.com/viewtopic.php?t=10

[rkawakami]

Saw references to WinImage this morning but Google also tagged those URLs with "This site may harm your computer" so I kept on going. I'll see if I can find a download site which doesn't trip any alarms

EasyBoot did appear to increase the size of the bootable image but it also injected it's own menu system. Since I didn't want that, the CD failed to boot.

[RealBlackStuff]

To create the HMD diskette, Lenovo uses this: http://dvalot.free.fr/emtcopy.htm

[Kaervak]

Saw references to WinImage this morning but Google also tagged those URLs with "This site may harm your computer" so I kept on going. I'll see if I can find a download site which doesn't trip any alarms

EasyBoot did appear to increase the size of the bootable image but it also injected it's own menu system. Since I didn't want that, the CD failed to boot.

It's benign from what I can tell. No weird behavior on my system. I've been playing around with winimage for a bit and aside from user error I think this will do exactly what's needed.

[mlkaplan]

Kaervak,

I am in the exact same situation as EmeraldGirl08, with a Z60m--updated BIOS, can't update ECP on Win7 (see here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=80211). I'm sure you don't want to field requests left and right to burn these things, but if you find yourself with a spare few minutes, it would really help me out! And if not, do you know of a way I can do this myself using Windows? Alas, I'm not a Linux guy...

Thanks,
Mike

[Kaervak]

Kaervak,

I am in the exact same situation as EmeraldGirl08, with a Z60m--updated BIOS, can't update ECP on Win7 (see here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=80211). I'm sure you don't want to field requests left and right to burn these things, but if you find yourself with a spare few minutes, it would really help me out! And if not, do you know of a way I can do this myself using Windows? Alas, I'm not a Linux guy...

Thanks,
Mike

BIOS & ECP:
http://home.roadrunner.com/~kaervak/Z60m.zip

Getting the physical floppy drive into image form on Windows shouldn't be all that difficult. However since there's no DD equivalent, getting them into ISO form is the tricky part.

[rkawakami]

From what I can tell from downloading about half-a-dozen ISO programs in the last day, creating a bootable CD from a single diskette-based program is pretty easy; I haven't actually tried it but looking at the program's options leads me to this conclusion. Even going to a two floppy disk set appears to be easy since you can image the CD as a 2.88MB floppy. What has eluded me so far is trying to break that 2.88MB barrier. The three floppies that make up the A2x PC Doctor program that I've been fighting with takes up about 4MB. I've tried various ways of specifying the disk format - 1.44MB, hard drive emulation and no emulation, but no luck so far. The main problem appears to be in how/what you use for the boot image. Using an original PC Doctor diskette to read the boot image, the resulting CD, when it does boot, only shows 1.44MB of capacity on the disk. You can read the disk in Windows and see all 4MB of files but when used as a boot disk, the program fails to run properly (keeps asking for the next floppy). Bailing out to DOS and doing a disk directory listing reveals why: the only files available are those from the first diskette because the system thinks there's only 1.44MB of allotted storage.

I think that I've come very close to getting this three-floppy transfer working. Using WinImage it appears that the disk is built correctly (the three system files are sitting at consecutive blocks at the beginning of the disk, the disk image is 5.76MB in size - exactly what I've specified) but the program only outputs a .IMA or .IMG file, not an .ISO. WinImage can't (or won't) convert the .IMA/.IMG file to an ISO and none of the other programs I've installed can do so either (MagicISO, IsoBuster, EasyBoot, UltraISO and one other which I tried but uninstalled). I think that I'm about back to square-one in this project and that's to take a small hard drive, partition it into a 5 or 10MB area, install the system files from the IBM PC Doctor floppy onto it and make it bootable, copy all three PC Doctor floppies into the bootable partition, do all of the necessary edits to the autoexec.bat file (to eliminate the "press any key to continues") and then use that hard drive to image onto a CD.

I've tried using both Easy CD Creator 5 and Nero 6 to burn the ISO images. I have ImgBurn on another system around here and I think that it can handle .IMG files so that's on the list of things to do. Aside: anybody know the difference between .IMA and .IMG files? And are those files using compatible formats?

Got to go out and run some errands today so I don't know when I'll get back to this. Thanks Kaervak for getting me interested in this again and for preparing those ISOs for me and others.

[Kaervak]

From what I remember in WinImage there's an option to create an ISO. I couldn't get it working, but I suspect that's because I was running it through wine and not an actual Windows install. I know Nero can handle IMA files without issue. IMG & IMA files do seem to be interchangeable from what I've read but trying to convert an IMA to ISO using mkisofs came back with errors for me. Probably a boot sector issue with the IMA file I was working with though.

[mlkaplan]

Kaervak, thank you very much...I really appreciate it!

[Kaervak]

Kaervak, thank you very much...I really appreciate it!

No problem, let me know if you need any others.

[cheifchimp]

I have a couple of thoughts on this issue:

a floppy img file is an image of the file system for a single disk so multi-disk set ups need to be remastered to merge the data. If you have linux I suggest maybe mounting each image (as loop?), merge/edit the images and treak the config.sys & autoexec.bat then save the hacked .img and make the cd from it. I haven't tried this but it is covered in a linux "HOW-TO" I saw a few years ago.

If I'm trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs please forgive me.

Another thought is could this be done with a USB memory stick?