Tommy wrote:
Well, that's not really what I want to do. For one thing, I don't know how to write the 2nd stage loader (which is 513+ bytes) to a number of sectors. What would do that (program)?
partcopy lets you specify how much you want to write and where to. For instance,
partcopy boot.asm 0 400 -f0 200
will write two sectors (1024 bytes) starting at the second sector (i.e. location 200). You could also write your own program to do this.
On the second point, certainly a file system makes sense at some stage of the game. My opinion is that it is an unnecessary complication to the problem of facing the basic design issues of loading, setting up the hardware, and task maintenance. In the 'baby steps' series for instance, I intended to show that A20 had nothing to do with switching to pmode. It simply adds more code to debug when things don't go as hoped.
There are many gotchas in this process that could be harder to ferret out inside a structure of superfluous code. It is a simple matter to go back and add stuff. Again, this is just my opinion. Other, more sensible people, might disagree.