Installing LoseThos To quickly try LoseThos, see VMWare. Or, burn a CD with software that supports ISO files. Then, boot it. It's a live CD, so you can look around with or without installing. Dual booting with another operating system is the best way to use LoseThos. You'll need a partition for LoseThos. If you are a Linux user, you will already be familiar with this and should have no problems. Windows, however, often comes with a restore disk that does not allow repartitioning. I recommend connecting a spare additional hard drive and using the BIOS to dual boot. If you successfully repartion and try to dual boot Windows with the LoseThos bootloader, Windows may not work. You might try installing Linux, just to use G rub, its boot loader. You might try GParted, a free tool which will repartition. The CD-ROM "Install" or "VMWareQuickInstall" options will automate much of this. See Boot.TXZ for an overview of booting. See Requirements for supported hardware. See Upgrading if you are upgrading. Two LoseThos partitions are highly recommended, so you can boot to a back-up and fix the primary when you work on it. Odds are, you only need a couple gigabytes for your LoseThos partitions. 1) Mount() use if the drive is partitioned. This command mounts a drive making it accessible. For simplicity, select 'C ' as the base drive letter for your hard drive. The first partition will be 'C', second, 'D', etc. LoseThos needs 3 numbers to utilize a hard drive -- base0, base1, and unit. When you enter a hexadecimal number, do it like in C with a 0x prefix. If the probe was successful, you can just enter the number in the probe box instead of base0. PartitionDisk('C') use if drive is not partitioned This will perform a special Mount() automatically. WARNING: This command erases everything on a hard drive. It repartitions a whole drive and formats the partitions. This command should be skipped if you already have your hard drive partitioned. WARNING: This command doesn't play well with other operating systems. You'll need to do a MasterBootZero() to restore your drive to a state where other operating systems can partition it. 2) Format('D',TRUE,FALSE,PT_FAT32) This command formats a partition with FAT32 or the LoseThos native file system type. Use the drive letter of the partition in place of 'D'. WARNING: If you are upgrading, be sure not to lose the file, /0000Boot/OldMBR .BIC. 3) CopyTree("T:/","D:/") This command is used to copy files onto a hard drive partition from the CD-ROM. Use the drive letter of the partition in place of 'D'. 4) InstallBoot('D') This command recompiles the source code on a partition and writes to the parti tion's boot record. You'll need to reenter the Mount information so it can be stored in the kernel. At the end, it'll ask for base0, base1 and Irq# again. 5) InstallMasterBoot('D') If you have Linux, use grub to boot a LoseThos partition, instead of installing the LoseThos boot loader with InstallMasterBoot(). Here is my linux /boot/grub/menu.lst file Grub.TXZ. Run update-grub after changing menu. lst. Note that grub requires no knowledge of files -- it just boots the partition boot block which has been prepared by InstallBoot(). The InstallMasterBoot() command places a boot loader on a drive to boot partitions. It saves the old master boot record to /0000Boot/OldMBR.BIC and replaces it. When you boot, you will have the option of booting the old master boot record. This command can be skipped if you already have a boot loader. Be sure not to lose the copy of the old boot record, like if you reformat the partition. Delete /0000Boot/OldMBR.BIC if you want to get a fresh copy of a mbr, like if installing from your own custom CD containing it's own /0000Boot/OldMBR.BIC onto a system with a non-LoseThos boot loader. If you have anti-virus software, it might object to having a different master boot record. * "Windows" is a trademark of MicroSoft Corp. * "Linux" is probably a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds.