Windows XP And OS Development?

[HIM666]

Hi

I got this crazy idea. I want to develop my own operating system. Not to compete with an existing system. But to learn more about how an OS works and how to communicate with a PC on a low level.

Assembler and C++ is the weapon of coice. Although I for obvious reasons don't want to rewrite my Master Boot Record on the harddrive while testing the system, I thought that perhaps I should use Virtual PC 2004 for testing. How ever I don't really know how I can load my system in to one of the Virtual Harddrives that VPC creates. Anybody has an idea??

[Doggie]

woah, forgive me for being blunt but you would really need extensive knowledge in many languages.. hardware and way it interacts much much more.. you would be doing this for many years.. i really wouldnt recommend it at all if u dont have sound knowledge

[XtremeMaC]

I second that

go look at linux source code and try to learn something out of it..

[agonified]

You may load your OS's files into an iso that boots directly into dos or WinPe or BartPe than copy these files to the hard drive in Virtual Machine..
Or,
You can select a partition to be assigned to be the hard drive of the virtual machine. I dont remember now but if Microsoft's virtual machine is not supporting this, I'm sure that VMWare supports..

Good luck..

[Fredledingue]

Come on, there are plenty of dual boot solution, aren't there?

Now I don't know how you gonna write an OS if you don't even know how to dual boot...

FYI: 2000 experienced programmers are working for years to develop the next Windows version... but I don't want to discourage you, maybe you will do better than them alone and in less time...

Seriousely: look at free OS prjects, Linux is one but look rather at Free OS, OS2 etc

Search for poject already in developement, they do welcome poeple like you willing to change things and try and stuff.

[HyperHacker]

I wouldn't want to try dual-booting an experimental OS while developing it. A bug could easily wreck your partitions. And imagine how tedious it would be to have to reboot every time you wanted to try something?

[jaclaz]

Yep, don't want to put you down, but the web is full of people starting "their own OS" and generally never going further than a bootloader and/or a flaky kernel.

There are some really interesting projects under development that do welcome willing programmers, here are a few:
REACTOS:
[url="http://www.reactos.com/"]http://www.reactos.com/[/url]
FREEDOS:
[url="http://www.freedos.org/"]http://www.freedos.org/[/url]
FREEDOS 32:
[url="http://freedos-32.sourceforge.net/"]http://freedos-32.sourceforge.net/[/url]

Personally I would use Qemu as an emulator, the newish Qemumanager works quite well, version 0.71 has added accelerators, it can handle RAW disks images, Qcow and VmWare ones:
[url="http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/"]http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/[/url]
[url="http://www.free.oszoo.org/"]http://www.free.oszoo.org/[/url]
[url="http://www.davereyn.co.uk/qemu.htm"]http://www.davereyn.co.uk/qemu.htm[/url]

jaclaz