Fwd: How do I instal Dragonfly BSD from a hard drive - rather than CD?

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Bill Hacker wrote:
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Hiten, you are onto something here:

- Thinking back to when a 'reboot' was not a complete system re-init, 
i.e. preserving JRAM under DOS 'reboot'...

How about a downloadable dumb-but-universal script that would run under 
anything from CP/M or DOS onward, collect the necessary settings, be 
made aware of where DragonFly could be found (network, CD, HDD), where 
it was to be installed, preserve all these settings in RAM, then jump to 
a routine that shed the host OS and brought itself into life to complete 
the install.
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If I remember correctly, current ghost (that image software) has an 
option to install a ghost client on a NT machine.
That client can receive a message that it should reboot in PC-DOS and 
load ghost, so when it receives that message it does the following:
- create a list of tasks
- Copy the mbr
- Install "ghost" mbr
- reboots
- boots PC-DOS from a ntfs or fat partition
- loads ghost.exe
- reads list & executes tasks
- copy back the original mbr if necessary

The tasks can be:
- installing a partitional image from and to the ntfs/fat32 partition.
- installing a full image from a separate ntfs/fat32 to the other partition
- installing a full image from a ghost server to the ntfs/fat32 partition
This means that if we had a scriptable win32 tool that creates a 
partition and boot record. Installation can be done via the "ghost" method.

If we had a NT driver to access and format the BSD partition, 
installation could even be done from native NT (thus skipping the boot 
record part) and at the end use the NT loader to bootstrap the BSD 
partition.

--
mph