On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 5:04 AM, escape <esc...@front.ru> wrote: > On 12.04.12 20:38, dmccunney wrote: >> I just made a post amending my statement. > Ok, but still it has nothing common with DOS itself. Because: > >> I amend my statement: they'll boot DOS if you jump through an >> assortment of hoops to get them to do so. I got FreeDOS to boot >> alongside Win2K and two flavors of Linux on an old notebook, but it >> took lots of fiddling (and I'm not sure just *which* fiddle did the >> trick. I was multi-booting from Grub2. > It's clearly not a DOS problem. Multiboot setup *must* be carefully > planned and deployed, and on every step you *must* clearly understand > what you are about to do. Or else you'll end up with "lots of fiddling", > being "not sure just *which* fiddle did the trick". Also worth > mentioning that GRUB2 is a way more complex to configure than GRUB-legacy.
I never said it was a DOS problem. It's a multi-boot problem. As a background aside, I started working with computers on an IBM mainframe in the late 70s, when the original 4.77 mhz IBM-PC was first appearing on corporate desktops, and worked my way across and down through DEC minis and Unix systems before Linux was a gleam on Linus Torvalds eye, and do most stuff in Windows and Linux these days. So I can claim fairly broad knowledge and a tolerable grasp of the issues. >> A subsequent clean re-install of Win2K to solve other problems broke >> it. I could get grub and my grub config back, but FreeDOS won't boot, >> claiming it can't find KERNEL.SYS. (And yes, I'm using a current >> kernel, SYSed to the correct place from a FreeDOS boot floppy.) I can >> successfully run DOS apps in a Win2K console window, so fixing it >> isn't exactly urgent. > It is well-known behaviour of Windows, to destroy any other single or > multi-OS boot schemes, replacing it with it's own bootloader. Also GRUB2 > is related in your particular case. But it's even less related to DOS > than previous statement, as *any* OS can be victim in such scenario. Again, I never said it was a DOS problem. And I've seen the Windows bootloader misbehave in odd ways just multibooting flavors of Windows with DOS and Linux nowhere near the mix. >> But if you are going to boot DOS on current hardware, you are likely >> to be multi-booting, with other things like Windows and Linux in the >> mix. That may require plain and fancy fiddling: what's your >> boot-loader? How do you successfully add DOS to the list of things it >> can boot? > I'm using GRUB-legacy. And for GRUB-legacy adding FreeDOS is as easy as > adding 3 lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst: > title FreeDOS 1.0 > rootnoverify (hd0,0) > chainloader /freedos.bss It's not *that* much more complicated on Grub2, once you locate the config file, and I've diddled that successfully in the past. (The section that *boots* DOS is correctly defined. The problem is somewhere else.) >> One question to ask is what you are doing, and whether you actually >> need to boot into DOS from the BIOS level at all. Epending upon your >> use case, it may make more sense to use an emulator or VM. > There is no silver bullet. And while using an emulator or VM can be > sufficient for many of the cases, they have their own downsides. Yes, they do. But my fundamental question is still valid. What is your use case? Do you actually *need* to boot DOS, or is a VM or emulator a better solution? I booted to DOS in the first place mostly to see if I could get it working as a "pure" DOS solution. But everything I *run* under DOS runs in a Windows console session, or in DOSBox under Linux, so I don't *need* to boot to DOS to do what I do with DOS apps. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For Developers, A Lot Can Happen In A Second. Boundary is the first to Know...and Tell You. Monitor Your Applications in Ultra-Fine Resolution. Try it FREE! http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-d2dvs2 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
