Hi Andrea, Zeno,

to give you an early summary of my suggestions about
www.ywesee.com/pmwiki.php/Site/FlashingBiosOfALinuxServer
and www.stilen.com/notes/usb_dos_boot.txt and related howtos:

Zeno uses makebootfat-fdisk-makebootfat, and has to
download boot sectors and mbr separately. Reading the
makebootfat docs it seems that using makebootfat once
should be enough :-)

For that I suggest a few updates for makebootfat:

-	make sure the included mbr works (does it set the 
	registers correctly before calling a boot sector?)

-	maybe add an option for "32 heads, 63 sectors" or
	even arbitrary heads and sectors. There already is
	the "ZIP style geometry 64 heads 32 sectors" option
	in the current makebootfat which could be extended.

-	include freedos boot sectors in makebootfat: they
	are small and open source. I personally would NOT
	include kernel and command.com though...

You can get pre-compiled freedos kernel and freecom command.com
versions on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/
(freecom 0.82pl3 is still classic - newer version 0.84 with long
file name support is not completely stable yet)

You can also get the boot sector sources directly from SVN, as
they are used in SYS which in turn is a part of the kernel SVN
repository:

http://freedos.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freedos/kernel/trunk/boot/

To create binary boot sector files from source, you use nasm.
The Linux version of nasm will be okay, and you do not even
need to use the makefile. I recommend to include pre-compiled
boot sector binaries in makebootfat :-). To compile them, do:

nasm -dISFAT12 boot.asm -ofat12com.bin
nasm -dISFAT16 boot.asm -ofat16com.bin
nasm boot32.asm -ofat32chs.bin
nasm boot32lb.asm -ofat32lba.bin

If you have questions, please let me know :-)

Eric