How to setup disks and CDROM drives
Assuming you have installed PearPC, you will now want to create an empty disk (if you want to install client software, e.g. Mandrake, Mac OS X, etc..) and/or use a CDROM drive (e.g. the Mandrake Install CDs, Mac OS X Install CDs, etc.. lying on your desk or in home directory).
Creating empty disks
The size of a disk image must be a multiple of 516096. Disk images are simply files. It's up to the client to understand their format. Recommended sizes for misc. software:
Mandrake: 3 GiB
Mac OS X: 3 GiB
Darwin: 1.5 GiB
Others: 3 GiB are OK
Windows users: Download an empty hard disk and uncompress it (you need a decompressor that supports .bz2, download WinRar or bzip2).
UN*X folks:
Create a disk image by executing:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=myharddisk.img bs=516096 seek=6241 count=0
which will create a disk image of about 3GiB.Or execute:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=myharddisk.img bs=516096 seek=12482 count=0
which will create a disk image of about 6GiB.Alternatively: bximage as shipped with Bochs might be working here too. Give it a try.
Using CDROM drives
Windows users:
There is currently no way to use your machine's CDROM drive(s) on Windows directly.
If you want to use CDs you must instead save them to your hard disk as a .iso file. You can do this using a CD-recording software (e.g. Nero Burning ROM, WinOnCD, Fireburner, etc..).
This .iso file is the one you will be working with.
UN*X folks:
You can select any file you want to as a the emulated CDROM. E.g. MandrakeLinux-9.1-CD1.ppc.iso a file residing somewhere on your file system. Or /dev/cdrom, the CD that's currently in your (host) CDROM drive.
If, for some reason, you would like to create a CD image from a CD, execute:$ cp /dev/cdrom somecd.iso
(assuming, that /dev/cdrom is your CDROM drive).