[ltp] Re: Booting an X30 off CompactFlash?

[Tod Harter]

On Wednesday 05 February 2003 09:17 am, Paul Crowley wrote:
>
> Still wondering if there's a solution that doesn't involve buying
> special hardware.  Is there somewhere in the XP boot sequence that a
> loadlin-like program could live?  Of course you'd need administrator
> privs to put anything there, but...

Well, there is nothing stopping you from writing a piece of software that 
boots some other OS from a running copy of XP (or any other version of 
windows or any other OS for that matter). It just has to be priviledged code 
so it can take control of the system in some way. For instance the PC BIOS 
provides entry points which reset the system to various degrees. There are 
win32 API service entry points for these functions as well. Some of them IIRC 
can pass control to code pages already loaded in memory. 

So the sequence would be, go to the drive you want to 'boot' from, find the 
kernel or bootstrap you want, load it into memory, and pass control to it via 
some BIOS call or whatnot.

I know years ago I wrote code that worked in win95 to do this, but that was a 
LONG while back...

You are correct that on NT and its descendants (win2k/XP) you would need to 
make your code priviledged (think 'setuid root'). I don't have the slightest 
idea how to do that!

-- 
Tod Harter
Giant Electronic Brain