Method and Apparatus for Presenting Drivers Stored on Utility Partition of Hard Disk Through Virtual Floppy to Operating System Installer

摘要

Installable device drivers may be stored on a partition, e.g., Utility Partition (UP) or other OEM partition, of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) storage device, e.g., hard disk drive, by associating an INT13h Basic Input-Output System (BIOS) interrupt call, e.g., reading from floppy disk drive a: or drive b: a desired storage device driver during the normal course of installing an operating system (OS), e.g., Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, Unix, etc., on the information handling system, e.g., personal computer, server, blade server, storage array, workstation, etc. The run-time loading of a raw floppy image having OS installable drivers residing in the Utility Partition or other hidden partition on the hard disk may be presented as a virtual floppy disk drive to the OS installer, e.g., person (manual) or scripted (automated) process.