boot freedos partition

[Bernhard Kuemel]

Hi help-grub!

In order to upgrade my mainboard BIOS I need to execute a DOS program. I
don't want to waste a CD on this and even though I have a floppy drive
and floppies I want to run freedos from a hard disk partition. Be it
because hard disks are more reliable or just because some day I might
not have any other choice. I read about methods involving disk images,
but I think just using a FAT partition should be the easiest and most
natural way.

So I formatted a 7 GB partition with mkfs.msdos which created a FAT32
partition. Not sure if freedos is compatible with 7 GB FAT32 partitions.

I copied these files from
http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz to the partition:

autoexec.bat
command.com
config.sys
install.bat
KERNEL.SYS
sys.com
wsys.exe

http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/boot.htm#dos says:

"FreeDOS can be booted by either chainloading the partition boot sector
of the relevant partition, or directly chainloading the file kernel.sys -

title Boot FreeDOS
root (hd0,0)
chainloader /kernel.sys
"

Great, I couldn't find a way to install a boot sector with linux
anyways. I changed that to:

menuentry "FreeDOS" {
set root=(hd0,6)
chainloader /kernel.sys
}

Is this the correct?

When I boot "FreeDOS" I get the error: "invalid signature".
Grub does display a list of files when I hit tab and completes 'k' to
'kernel.sys' so it seems to be able to read from the partition.

Should I capitalize kernel.sys?
Should I mark the partition bootable?
Does it need to be a primary partition?
Shall I use FAT16?

Bernhard