I have the sense that feelings are running a little hot here; let's all try to be a bit calmer, please?
To clarify what SpyderTL said, the image files used by Bochs are ordinary files in the host system, so they don't need to be mounted as separate drive images. Rather, you pass the file name to Bochs in the
.bochsrc (*nix) or
bochsrc.txt (Windows) configuration file. You can find the
details of the configuration file format with the
Bochs documentation.
They can also be passed as command-line arguments, but as a practical matter, using the configuration file is almost always the better approach.
In addition to the disk image, you will need at least a
BIOS ROM image and a VGA BIOS ROM image. These should be included in any of the
distributions for Bochs, including the usual
Windows installer.
There are also a multitude of configuration options for the CPU, memory, etc. most of which have defaults but some of which you might want to alter.
For example, if you have a floppy disk image file called
a.img, you could use a bochsrc.txt with the following:
Code:
# disk image file for a 1.44M floppy disk
disk: 1_44="<MY-PATH>/a.img" , status=inserted
# System BIOS image
romimage: file="<MY-ROM-PATH>/BIOS-bochs-latest", address=0xfffe0000
# VGA BIOS - for this example, we can use the
vgaromimage: file="<MY-ROM-PATH>/VGABIOS-lgpl-latest"
# set the type of VGA support to use - in this case, the default VESA BIOS Extensions
vga: extension=vbe
# set the amount of memory (in megabytes) available to the emulated PC,
# and the amount actually allocated by the host (e.g., real) PC
memory: guest=64, host=128
# details of the emulated CPU
# count is the number of emulated CPUs
# ips is instructions per second; an IPS of 10 million is roughly equal
# to a 10MHz system (in theory).
cpu: count=1, ips=10000000
where the <MY-PATH> is the directory the image file is in (e.g., "C:\Users\Daniel M\My Documents\OS Experiments\") , and <MY-ROM-PATH> is the directory for the ROM images.
If you need to practice using Bochs with a known good disk image before trying to create one yourself, the Bochs website has
several prepared examples, including FreeDOS, OpenBSD, and a number of versions of Linux. These are usually included in the binary installers as well.
This is just a starting point, though. The
Bochs Wiki and the
OSDev.org Wiki page on Bochs both have more extensive explanations of this, and a
search of this forum should reveal a lot of advice on the subject.