Using Grub with memdisk

[Dr A V Le Blanc]

I have tried twice to submit this, but both times the message has
never appeared.  Let's hope this one gets through.

About two years ago, I asked in bug-grub about the possibility of
booting from a DOS virtual floppy using GRUB.  Nothing came of it
at the time.  Recently someone pointed out to me that syslinux
can do this: it contains a feature called memdisk, which allows
the DOS floppy image to become a ramdisk, while mendisk itself
intercepts int 13 and int 15 calls so that the ramdisk appears
to DOS as a floppy or even as a hard drive.

Now I don't want to use syslinux; indeed, I can't in my environment.
I don't see why memdisk can't work with GRUB.  GRUB sees memdisk
as a Linux kernel, and I've tried loading it in this way and
passing the floppy image to it using the initrd command.  When
I do this, GRUB hangs.

If syslinux can do it, why can't we?  Sample binaries available
on request.

     -- Owen
     address@hidden