(FreeDOS developers, I apologize for the redundant parts of this message. But I want to bring the SYSLINUX folks into the discussion, and the SourceForge mailing list archives are broken.)
Background: I have a little Sourceforge project (http://unattended.sourceforge.net/) for which I use SYSLINUX to provide CD-ROM and PXE boot support for my boot disk. And it works great with MS-DOS. However, I want to use FreeDOS for the boot disk. This is very close to working with the latest releases of the FreeDOS kernel and utilities. I just have one blocking problem. I am trying to use himem64.exe, part of FreeDOS EMM386: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/emm386/ I am comparing it with fdxxms.sys, part of FDXMS: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/fdxms/ When I use PXELINUX+memdisk (version 2.08) to boot a trivial FreeDOS boot disk on my IBM Thinkpad T20, using "DEVICE=himem64.exe" in config.sys, the system spontaneously reboots after reading config.sys and printing this message: Kernel allocated 42 Diskbuffers = 22344 Bytes in HMA This problem only happens on the T20; it does not happen on my other test system (Dell Optiplex GX200). It does not happen if I use "DEVICE=fdxxms.sys ps" instead of himem64.exe. And it does not happen if I boot from a physical floppy instead of PXELINUX+memdisk. I cannot control which hardware my users have (unfortunately). I cannot just use "fdxxms.sys ps" because my testers report that it does not always work for them. So I would like to use himem64.exe. But there is apparently some incompatibility between himem64.exe and memdisk on this laptop. I would like to help fix this. My knowledge of x86 internals is limited, but I am pretty good at testing binaries and reporting back results... Eric Auer, a FreeDOS developer, commented: Note that MEMDISK access might fail while A20 is off - the handler itself is in 40:[13] allocated low memory, but the disk itself is in int 15 high memory as far as I remember. You should check the MEMDISK sources to see how disk data is accessed and what is done for the A20. Unfortunately, I do not know enough x86 assembly to understand the memdisk sources. Help? - Pat _______________________________________________ SYSLINUX mailing list Submissions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe or set options at: http://www.zytor.com/mailman/listinfo/syslinux Please do not send private replies to mailing list traffic. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
