RiscOS !PC, is it possible disk image

hi guys
i am running !PC V308 on RiscOS v4.39, i wonder if it’s possible to convert a physical disk image into the file-disk-image the !PC application is expecting to find.

i mean, i have a PC486 machine, i’d like to
1) put a gentoo CD on, and bootstrapping from it (i am able to bootstrap linux on 486)
2) DD if=/dev/HDA1 of=hd.img
3) put this file on the RiscOS machine

then i’d like the !PC application able to see and to boot from this file

is it possible ?

I think the general principle should work, but:

• You need to use /dev/hda not /dev/hda1 – the image needs to be a full disc not a partition
• It needs to be less than 2GiB
• You won’t be able to boot Linux – the PC card does lots of special stuff in its BIOS, which Linux ignores. It’s DOS-based operating systems only.

yep, i have a smaller hard drive, it’s something like 1.2Gbyte

do you know exactly what is missing to run linux on the guestCPU-card ?

btw, i am also planning to clone my DOS-v6.22 hard drive, it’s 600Mbyte, and has a lot of compilers and applications i want to migrate.

so i will clone the whole hard drive instead of the single partition. Understood.

Essentially the PC card is an x86 CPU bolted to a chip that emulates lots of PC-style I/O. A small amount of this is implemented on the chip (like interrupt control), and the rest is passed over to the ARM to emulate. There is some very limited emulation of I/O (so if the x86 reads from ISA address 0xABC then an interrupt is raised on the ARM, which is handed over to the ARM-side driver that implements the ISA peripheral in software, and returns the value to the x86) but it’s very slow so most functionality (disc, graphics) resides in either BIOS or Windows drivers. So it would need new Linux drivers writing that use the ARM side APIs rather than emulating ISA peripherals.

This was done once:
http://www.riscos.info/index.php/PC_Card_Linux
however I’ve been unable to find the sources. In any case, I don’t think Linux 1.1 is very useful today!