Hello and thanks for the info. Mostly, I’m needing to verify stuff. Except
recently,
I haven’t run any form of DOS years.
For the most part, the utility needs to check that drive C:
1) is partitioned.
2) will be bootable after install.
3) is formatted and ready for install.
> On Aug 30, 2015, at 5:49 PM, Rugxulo <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 4:31 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> I’m working on a utility to check the state of the hard disk drives prior to
>> the installation of FreeDOS.
>> This utility “CheckHDD” will scan the system and figure out what the FreeDOS
>> installer needs to
>> do to the drives for a successful install.
>>
>> I’ve got a couple questions for you all.
>>
>> Can FreeDOS be installed on a partition >2gb.
>
> FAT32, yes. I have a 4 GB FAT32 partition on this machine.
I though that might be the case. But I wasn’t positive. Good to hear
it is not limited to FAT16 and can boot from FAT32.
>
>> Will it work above the 2gb limit?
>
> Not sure what this means. The maximum file size is still 2 GB (last I
> heard) although FAT32 (barely, via additional API) can support 4 GB-1
> files (in theory). Some old BIOSes might still have limits making it
> stick to 137 GB (or such?) unless some external fix (OnTrack??) is
> used.
>
>> Will it boot from the second primary DOS partition on the same drive?
>> You get the idea.
>
> You mean via vanilla SYS boot sector? I've not done a lot with that,
> but I think you can change the boot drive, yes. If not, I'm 99% sure
> that most boot managers (including "BOOT" BootMgr or Grub4DOS or
> whatever) can do similar.
Basically, I mean. Let’s say HDD0 is partitioned like so:
0 - FAT16 w/MS-DOS installed. (not Hidden)
1 - FAT32 w/FreeDOS installed and set to Active/Boot.
With or without using a boot loader. Will FreeDOS boot OK and
use partition 1 for C: and 0 for D:?
Also, do you know if it will boot from an extended partition?
>
>> After it figures stuff out, it will exit with an appropriate errorlevel for
>> the FreeDOS installer to
>> process.
>>
>> At present this is what I am thinking:
>>
>> 7 - No Hard Drive Detected.
>>
>> Can’t find any physical hard drives.
>> Either misconfigured controller, no drives, dead drive… etc
>> Unless they want a boot floppy, cannot proceed.
>>
>> 6 - No Primary DOS Partitions Found.
>>
>> You need to partition a drive for FreeDOS.
>>
>> 5 - Primary Partition Not marked Bootable.
>>
>> C is not bootable, run fdisk and make it active or ignore and just
>> install.
>>
>> 4 - "Boot" partition not formatted.
>>
>> hey, you want to format C:?
>
> Some of that is bound to (barely?) be supported by BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT.
I’m not familiar with BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT.
>
>> 3 - No Boot code in MBR.
>>
>> Um, won’t format /s or sys c: fix this?
>
> "format /s" just calls SYS, right? And SYS will update the boot sector
> (but probably not the partition table). Can't remember what FDISK /MBR
> does or when it's useful. (To be honest, I'm no expert, obviously, and
> this stuff gets confusing and arcane very quickly!)
>
>> 2 - “Boot” partition not on first hard disk drive and a dos partition is on
>> there.
>>
>> Might be ok, if system is set to boot second hard disk drive first or
>> boot loader
>> like grub is being used.
>>
>> 1 - Other DOS partitions sectors past 2 gb limit:
>>
>> I hear people are doing this and it is working for them.
>> However, is not recommended.
>> Warn user and proceed to install prompts.
>
> It's FAT16 that is limited to 2 GB. Similar to "classic" MS-DOS 6.22
> (and Win95 pre-OSR 1 or whatever). But "most" modern DOSes (and
> compatibles) support FAT32, including FreeDOS.
Good. It will same me from having to do more big number math in assembly. :)
>
>> 0 - No Issues found:
>>
>> Procedure to Install?
>
> This stuff is hard to safely and conveniently test, so maybe setting
> up a VM (VirtualBox?) would be best (stating the obvious here, I don't
> have lots of throwaway physical machines to play with).
Very much so. I’m doing the dev testing in vmWare. That way I can just
add/remove drives etc.
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