Notes to accompany the DISK.COM utility.

DISK.COM is a small utility used to interrogate the BIOS about the
support for disks at boot time.  It displays the geometry information
for each disk as returned by the BIOS.  It should be run as close to
the BIOS as possible.

Option 1:  Boot Windows 98 to the Command Prompt only.  Then run
DISK.COM, and check the output to see if your BIOS supports EDD
version 1.0 or later.

Option 2:  Boot DOS from a floppy disk.  Then run DISK.COM as above.

Option 3:  Create a bootable floppy using the enclosed 'diskboot.img'
file.  Your Linux CDROM may contain the utility RAWRITE.EXE in the
DOSUTILS directory, which may be used to create the bootable floppy. 
If you have Linux booted, the floppy may be created with:

   dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/fd0
   sync
#optional
   make disk.com
   cp disk.com  /myDosCpartition
#NOW under DOS 
   copy  C:disk.com  A:
#This copy must be under DOS, as some Linux kernels will
#render the floppy unbootable if the 'cp' is direct to the
#diskette (why does Linux 2.2 muck with the boot record???)

This is a bootable floppy, which will boot & run DISK.COM directly. 
This is the most reliable way to check your BIOS for EDD support.
The distributed image of 'diskboot.img' contains code to boot a file
called DISK.COM.  You may copy your compiled version of DISK.COM to 
this floppy by mounting it, and then copying the newly assembled version
of DISK.COM to it.

Remember:  If your BIOS does not have EDD support for large drives,
LILO version 21-4 will not be able to boot beyond cylinder 1023.  If
your BIOS has EDD support, then using LILO version 21-4 with the '-L'
switch (or 'lba32' in the 'lilo.conf' file) will avoid the 1024
cylinder limitation.

--John Coffman     27-Mar-2000

