ultimate boot cd

[slinky2004]

i was checking out the ultimate boot cd on www.ultimatebootcd.com (great tool btw) and their "how it started" page says this:

This project was started in June 2003, when I had trouble running DFT (Drive Fitness Test) on a floppyless machine. I emailed IBM technical support and asked them if it was possible to boot DFT from a CD, and the answer I got was "no".

Not one to give up so easily, I tried burning DFT to a bootable CD using Nero, but for some reason that didn't work too. After some research on the Net, I discovered isolinux and memdisk, and successfully ran DFT using the combo. I was fired up from the success, and assembled a few DOS diagnostic programs to form the first release of the UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD).

how do they run DOS progs in linux? the customize page had some info on it but i didnt get it. seems like they're using bootable floppy images and somehow running them in the isolinux environment but i still dont get how they would do that.

[oofki]

I dont think they use linux anymore. If it is its just the bootloader. When it runs a program like dft or a dos program it actually starts up freedos and runs the executable. The menu is just a list of bascially images that are bootable.

[slinky2004]

oh, thanx. i guess that description they put up was a little misleading, it would be cool if they had a little "how it works" page but i didnt see one, there wasnt a contact or anything listed either. i actually did see a section about the "INSERT UBCD" and that had some linux tools on it, i was wondering what the difference was cuz that "about us" page said the UBCD used isolinux, but i guess that just needs to be updated or something

[oofki]

insert is optional on the cd the baisc version doesnt even have it. But if they told you how it worked then it would be as fun!